Her editor's name is Paul Merritt. He is fifty-one, silver-haired, with the particular energy of a man who has been chasing important stories for twenty-five years and has developed, in the process, an almost physical intolerance for anything that is not one.
He calls her into his office on a Tuesday morning and says: "The Surgeon."
She sits down. She says: "I know."
"You were already on it."
"I've been on it for three months."
He looks at her with the expression that means he is trying to decide whether she is ahead of the story or inside it, which are two very different places for a journalist to be. She has seen the expression before. She keeps her face neutral.
"What do you have?"
"Not enough to publish. Enough to know the shape." She crosses her legs. "The killings are real, the pattern is consistent with a single perpetrator, the medical methodology is specific enough that the FBI is looking at surgeons and emergency physicians. The targets are all violent offenders with prior records."
"And the moral angle."
"Is there. Yes."
Merritt leans back. He has a plant on his windowsill that has been dying slowly for four years. He waters it sometimes. It has not improved. "The podcast has three hundred thousand plays. The Inquirer story got a hundred and forty thousand web hits. This is the biggest story in this city since—"
"I know what it is, Paul."
"Then why aren't you writing it?"
She is quiet for a moment. She thinks about the blue board in her apartment. She thinks about the press badge at the center of it. She thinks about a man in a diner, drinking coffee with both hands wrapped around the mug, giving her nothing.
"Because I can't prove it yet," she says. "And I don't write things I can't prove."
"You can write what the FBI has confirmed publicly. You can write about the victims. You can write the community response—"
"I can write a better story than that." She meets his eyes. "Give me six more weeks."
He studies her for a moment. Paul Merritt has known her for six years. He knows what six weeks from her means. It means she already has it and she is making sure it is airtight before she brings it in.
"Four," he says.
"Five."
"Four and a half."
"Fine." She stands. "I need full access to the archive database and I need the legal budget cleared for one source protection consultation."
"Done." He is already looking at his computer. "Roseline."
She stops at the door.
"Whatever you have — whatever you think you have — be careful." He does not look up. "Stories like this one have a way of deciding they own you."
She thinks: I know.
She does not say it. She goes back to her desk.
Witness is home alone. She thinks about that for a second — the cat on the couch, the board on the wall, the name at the center of it.
She opens her laptop.
She starts to write.