Hard News

the frames. “Must’ve been one hell of a decade.”
    It was a stunningly gorgeous Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of three-dimensional blue and the sun felt as hot as a lightbulb. Piper Sutton sat on a piling she’d covered with a scrap of blue cloth—one of Rune’s work shirts—before she’d lowered her black-suede-encased thighs onto the splintery wood.
    “You have insurance?” the anchorwoman asked.
    “Kinda weird but, yeah, I do. It was one of those adult things, you know, the sort that I don’t usually get into. But my boyfriend at the time made me get some.” She walked to the water and looked down at the charred wood. “The policy’s in there someplace. Do I have to have it to collect?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I’m going to make some serious money there. I lost some really hyper stuff. Day-Glo posters, crystals, my entire Elvis collection …”
    “You listen to Elvis Presley?”
    “That’d be Costello,” Rune explained. Then considered other losses. “My magic wand. A ton of incense … Oh God, my Lava Lamp.”
    “You have a Lava Lamp?”
    “Had,”
Rune corrected sadly.
    “Where’re you staying?”
    “With Sam for a while. Then I’ll get a new place. Someplace different. I was ready to move anyway. I lived here for over a year. That’s too long to be in one place.”
    A tugboat went by. A horn blared. Rune waved. “I know them,” she told Sutton, who twisted around to watch the low-riding boat muscle its way up the river.
    “You know,” Rune said, “I’ve got to tell you. I kind of thought you were the one behind the killings.”
    “Me?” Sutton wasn’t laughing. “That’s the stupidest crap I ever heard.”
    “I don’t think it’s so stupid. You tried to talk me out of doing the story then offered me that job in England—”
    “Which was real,” Sutton snapped. “And got filled by somebody else.”
    Rune continued, unfazed, “And the day of the broadcast, when you ad-libbed, the tapes were missing. Even the backup in my credenza. You were the only one knew they were there.”
    Sutton impatiently motioned with her hand, as if she were buying candy by the pound and wanted Rune to keep adding some to the scale. “Come on, think, think, think. I told you I was on my way to see Lee.
He
asked me if you’d made a dupe. I told him that you had and you’d put it in your credenza.
He’s
the one who stole it.”
    “You also went through my desk after Boggs escaped. Danny saw you—the electrician.”
    “I didn’t want any of that material floating around. You were really careless, by the way. You trust too many people. You …” She realized she was lecturing and reined herself in.
    They watched the tugboat for a few minutes until it disappeared. Then Sutton said abruptly, “You want your job back, you can have it.”
    “I don’t know,” Rune said. “I don’t think I’m a company person.”
    A brief laugh. “Of course you’re not. You’ll get fired again. But it’s a peach job until you do.”
    “The local or the Network?”
    “Current Events
, I was thinking.”
    “Doing what? Like a script girl?”
    “Assistant producer.”
    Rune paused then dropped a pair of scorched jeans into the trash pile. “I’d want to do the story. The whole thing. About the Hopper killing. And I’d have to include Lee this time.”
    Sutton turned back, away from the water, and stood up, looking over the huge panorama of the city. “That’s a problem.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Current Events
won’t be running any segments about the Hopper killing. Or about Boggs.”
    Rune looked at her.
    “Network News covered it,” the woman said.
    Rune said wryly, “Oh, that’s right. I saw that story. It was about sixty seconds long, wasn’t it? And it came after the story of the baby panda at the National Zoo.”
    “The powers-that-be—at the parent—decided the story should go away.”
    “That’s bullshit.”
    “Can you blame them?”
    “Yes,” Rune said.
    In her prototype Piper Sutton voice, Piper Sutton snapped, “It wasn’t my decision to make.”
    “Wasn’t it?”
    Sutton took a breath to speak then didn’t. She shook her head slowly, avoiding Rune’s eyes.
    Rune repeated, “Wasn’t it?” And surprised herself again by hearing how calm she sounded, how unshaken she now was in the presence of this woman—a woman who wore suede and silk and bright red suits, a woman richer and smarter than she’d ever be. A famous commentator, who