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against white sky. He shielded his eyes with the notebook. A woman’s face teased from behind long black hair. She swept the hair back with a red mitten, revealing skin the shade of clear tea. She was young, maybe late twenties, and striking—Cambodian, most likely. Eddie’s eyes lingered on her.
    A yelp echoed off the canal walls.
    â€œShit! This is cold,” a diver yelled from the water. “My balls are shrinking to BBs.”
    McCabe bellowed at him. “You don’t need ’em. I wear out your old lady whenever you work a double shift.”
    All the cops chuckled. The diver yelled back, “Small price to pay for overtime.”
    The divers slipped the bag under the body and fed straps up to the cops on the ledge. The uniformed guys pulled up the corpse and set it face-up on the ground. McCabe wrestled his huge hands inside rubber gloves and squatted next to the body in silence for a minute, touching nothing.
    He deadpanned, “Boys, I don’t think this guy’s gonna make it.” Eddie made a note that the body still had a wristwatch, a black sports model, on the left wrist.
    â€œWhite male,” McCabe said. “Severe trauma, face and head.”
    That was police understatement. Something had smashed this guy’s nose to pulp. The lower lip was split. The cheeks were beaten to the bone. Maybe he jumped off a building, or stumbled drunk into a passing truck—or maybe this was a homicide.
    Eddie’s little canal story had become page-one news.
    Where the hell are you, Danny?
    He paged Nowlin again.
    McCabe stepped aside to let the police photographer take some more shots. Eddie looked again to the woman on the roof. There was only the sky.
    The photographer finished his work. McCabe stepped back to the body. He ran his hands inside the coat and checked the breast pockets. “No wallet,” he said. He patted the front trouser pockets. Nothing. Suddenly his arm recoiled. “Christ!” he yelled.
    Eddie jumped back on reflex.
    McCabe reached in the coat and yanked out a small black box. “I felt something moving,” he said. “His goddam pager is going off.”
    A breath of Fear chilled Eddie’s neck. He had met Fear—or, more accurately, invented her—when he was ten years old, and his curiosity had gotten him trapped in an abandoned well rumored to have been filled with bones. He had never been more terrified. During that night, his fear took on a personality. It became Fear, a leggy redhead with flaming red nails and lips—part biker-chick, part vampire. At the same time sexy and frightening.
    McCabe wiped a thumb over the pager’s tiny digital screen and frowned. He looked at Eddie. Fear nuzzled up from behind and pressed her icicle tits to Eddie’s back.
    â€œHey Ed,” McCabe said. “On this guy’s beeper, ain’t this your number?” He double-checked the digits recorded on the pager. “You want this stiff to call your cell phone?”

Chapter 2
    There were no tears for Danny Nowlin in the newsroom.
    It’s not that reporters are cold to tragedy, just detached, too consumed with trying to get the story right. Readers are easy to educate, but how do you make them feel? The best tragic stories bring a stranger to life, and then take that life away. Reporters see the production from backstage; they recognize the details that are moving, but can’t afford to be moved by them.
    The newsroom’s stunned silence quickly evolved into action. Everyone on the staff had written tragedies before. They decided that for Nowlin, they would write the best one ever published in The Empire. Several volunteered to cull through Danny’s old stories for excerpts of his work. Copy editors stayed late on their own time to perfect the layout. Everyone on the news staff composed a quote about Danny, to run under a head shot of the author. For his quote, Eddie typed, “He would have won a Pulitzer