Lost Light

wore a name tag that said Mrs. Molloy.
    “Of course you do,” she said. “You must know that. How can I help you?”
    “I need to look for stories that were in the Times from about three years ago.”
    “You want to do a key word search?”
    “I guess so. What is that?”
    She smiled.
    “We have the Los Angeles Times on computer going back to nineteen eighty-seven. If what you are looking for was published after that, all you have to do is go online on one of our computers, type in a key word or phrase, like a name, for example, that you think is in the story and it will search for it. There is a five-dollar-per-hour fee for accessing the newspaper archives.”
    “Fine, that’s what I want to do.”
    She smiled and reached beneath the counter. She handed me a white plastic device that was about a foot long. It looked like no computer I had ever seen.
    “How do I use this?”
    She almost laughed.
    “It’s a pager. All our computers are being used at the moment. I will page you as soon as one becomes available.”
    “Oh.”
    “The pager doesn’t work outside of the building. It also does not emit an audible page. It vibrates. So keep it on your person.”
    “I will. Any idea how long it will be?”
    “We set one-hour use limits, which right now would mean one won’t be available for another thirty minutes. However, people often don’t require the full hour.”
    “Okay, thank you. I’ll be nearby.”
    I found an empty table in one of the reading rooms and decided to work on the case chronology. I got out my notebook and on a fresh page wrote down the three key dates and events I knew.

    Angella Benton-murdered-May 16, 1999
    Movie set heist-May 19, 1999
    Martha Gessler-missing-March 19, 2000

    I then began adding the things I was missing.

    Gessler/Dorsey-phone call-?????

    And after a few moments I thought of something else that might help explain something that bothered me.

    Dorsey/Cross-murder/shooting-?????

    I looked around to see if anyone was using a cell phone. I wanted to make a call but wasn’t sure it would be allowed in a library. When I turned and looked behind me I saw a man standing by a magazine rack quickly turn away and take a magazine off the display without seeming to look at what it was first. He was dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Nothing about him said FBI but it still seemed to me that he had been looking directly at me until I had looked at him. His reaction had been too quick, almost furtive. There had been no eye contact, nothing that suggested any sort of overture. The man clearly didn’t want me to know he was watching me.
    Putting my notebook away, I got up from the table and headed toward the magazine racks. I passed the man and noticed that the magazine he had grabbed was called Parenting Today. It was another strike against him. He didn’t look like the parenting type to me. I was pretty sure I was being watched.
    Back at the reference desk I put my hands on the counter and leaned over to whisper to Mrs. Molloy.
    “Can I ask you a question? Is it okay to use a cell phone in the library?”
    “No, it’s not. Is somebody bothering you by using a phone?”
    “No, I was just wondering what the rule was. Thank you.”
    Before I could turn away she said she was just about to page me because a computer was now available. I gave her back the pager and she led me to a cubicle where the glowing screen of a computer was waiting.
    “Good luck,” she said as she headed back to the desk.
    “Excuse me,” I said, beckoning her back. “Um, I don’t know how to get to the Times stuff on this.”
    “There’s an icon on the desktop.”
    I turned back around and scanned the desk. There was nothing on it but the computer and the keyboard and the mouse. The librarian started to laugh behind me but then covered her mouth with her hand.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just… you don’t know the first thing about how to do this, do you?”
    “Or the second or the third. Can you just help get me started?”
    “Hold on. Let me just go check the front desk and make sure there is no one waiting for me.”
    “Fine. Thank you.”
    She was gone thirty seconds and then came back and leaned over me to work the mouse and click through screens until she was inside the Times archives and at what she called the key word search template.
    “So now you type in the key word for the story you are looking for.”
    I nodded that I understood that much and typed in the