Gloria Hedlund held her handbag and briefcase on the sides of her body, as she had when leaving work for the past twenty-five years. She had still been getting work as a model when she started at Channel Ten, and she had kept up all the tricks—use the loads you have to carry as free weights for exercise, watch your posture, think about the wrinkles your face is making, never forget what sun and alcohol did to skin. You never had to have anything repaired if you didn’t damage it first.

Her modeling agents had taught her to make her body a temple, and she still worshipped at it. She was long past modeling anything, but it didn’t matter because the money would have been negligible compared with what she made now. But she still did dance exercises, still ran, and still worked out on the machines. On her days off she did the things that took time—swimming and riding a bike.

Even on nights like tonight she never neglected her skin. She followed the same regimen of cleansing, hydrating, and lubricating with lotion that she did on the early nights. The days like today were the ones that did the most damage. They made a person’s forehead hold those washboard wrinkles for extended periods of time, and she’d always had to fight that habit of pursing her mouth that made more wrinkles appear above her upper lip. She was about ten years older than she looked.

Today had been one of the hardest for personal reasons. She was hired twenty-five years ago as just another beauty contestant who would be sent out into the rare rainy weather in Los Angeles to behave as though standing around in the rain made sense. They used to send her to spots like Mulholland Drive or the Griffith Observatory or the beach, even though it was raining just as hard on the sidewalk outside the station. Each year when the ski slopes opened they sent her two hundred miles into the mountains so she could interview people stopped along the uphill highway to buy gas or put on tire chains. And when that happened she had always liked it, because at least she was talking to real people on camera.

Gloria Hedlund had outlasted the others of her era, and she had thrived. After the years of being part of “team coverage” she had gotten to be one of the occasional weekend anchors at the studio desk when the first-string news readers had their nights off. Then she spent another eight years as a weeknight anchor before she got to where she was now, not just a news reader, but a real journalist.

Lately she had begun looking professionally at Dick Stahl. When she first learned of him about five years ago, she sensed something about him she didn’t like. Was he a real person? He had started out as a soldier, then became an army explosives expert, then the head of the LAPD Bomb Squad, and finally the owner of a private security company. His bio had the clean smell of omission that life stories of public figures in Los Angeles sometimes had.

Even her first search of the newspaper archive had been very LA. Stahl had a clientele that included a lot of Hollywood people, a few high-profile defendants in court cases, the principals in nasty big-money divorces. There were photographs of him in the backgrounds at parties that huge real estate companies or banks held, and there was no question he was there working.

As far as Gloria could tell, Stahl had never been willing to speak to reporters. That alone had made her suspicious of him. He was an expert in the false politeness that cops used to ensure not that they would never give offense, but that they could never be accused of it. He was also sure of what he could do to get a press reporter, photographer, or television newsperson out of his way when he was leading a client somewhere. When she was doing her research about him she had seen it on unaired video. Some large male reporters tended to use their size and weight to keep a celebrity or a suspect blocked where he was for questions or pictures. Dick Stahl was not someone who made that easy. He simply kept going, never quite stopping, his hand on the client’s upper arm, always smiling.

She had watched footage of Stahl taking a client out past David Wainscott from Channel Seven a couple of years ago. David was very big and intimidating, and he had planted himself in the only path through a crowd, the space between a car and the curb. Stahl came along smiling and saying: “Excuse us please. Excuse us. Thank you. Thank you very much.” At the last moment, David Wainscott seemed to realize he had put himself in a position that should have been effective, but also made him very vulnerable, and Stahl wasn’t reacting the way Wainscott had expected. He wasn’t stopping.

There was nowhere for Wainscott to sidestep or even turn his body, because his feet were too long to let him pivot in the narrow space. He was going back or he was going down. The camera showed Wainscott wince in pain as Stahl stepped on his instep, and then David staggering backward and bumping into the reporters behind him, stepping on their feet and then falling backward onto two of them. Stahl never stopped, simply kept up his progress, stepped past Wainscott and around the car, put the client into the backseat, and slid in beside her. The door slammed and the car pulled ahead and picked up speed. A careful slow-motion examination of the footage showed nothing actionable. Stahl hadn’t hit, pushed, threatened, or even stopped smiling.

Her distaste for him five years ago wasn’t hatred. She just filed him in the back of her mind as one of the cops and former cops who knew how to avoid letting his client be trapped and forced to respond to uncomfortable questions. She made sure there was never any mention of his name on her airtime to give him free publicity, and went on.

As soon as Stahl had returned to her attention two months ago with his odd history and insider connections she began to keep track of him. She wasn’t after him. And as he helped rebuild the Bomb Squad and began to take apart bombs that she was assured would have killed anyone else, Channel Ten had to give him the adulation everyone else was giving him. But she kept watching and listening.

And when she realized what the rest of the story was, what he had been hiding, the information clarified everything for her. She had seen this kind of thing before. God, had she seen it.

This was just like what had happened in her first job after college. The news director at Charlotte was a handsome man about forty years old named James, who had once been a reporter at the network. When he hired her, things had seemed just fine. He worked with the reporters as a team leader. He occasionally took the evening news staff out before the show. After a while, sometimes it was after the show. But inevitably, there came a time when there were only four of them, and then one at a time, the others left. After a couple of drinks, he said he wanted her to date him. She had begun to walk the tightrope—not rejecting him outright, but not agreeing. She said she was too busy, and then she was too tired, and then she had plans. He never gave up, never missed a chance.

Then one day she was called into the owner’s office. The owner said, “I’m truly sorry, Gloria. We had hoped Jimmy had started growing up, but apparently he hasn’t. He’s been bothering and pressuring you, hasn’t he?”

She was so relieved she nearly cried. She hoped they weren’t going to fire him, but as time passed he had become more insistent. She said, “Yes. I didn’t want to complain about him, because most of the time he’s nice.”

The owner sighed. “Well, we can’t have that stuff going on here. I’ve ordered your severance check and included a bonus for the extra trouble. Melinda has it out at the desk, along with some things for you to sign.”

“My check?”

“We can’t fire Jimmy. His contract is too expensive, and it has penalties. We’d be paying him to keep the station in court. Look, there won’t be any blame for you. We’ll make sure you have terrific references.”

It had taken her three years after that to work her way back up through two small stations in Kentucky to a major station in Atlanta. By then she was twenty-six. Even though Atlanta was a place where she could make extra money modeling, she took few assignments. She worked over sixty hours every week and learned everything she could. She became a good reporter. She also kept everything professional. Even in the one instance when she was attracted to someone in the newsroom, she turned him down.

In another four years she was almost thirty-one, and she finally made it to a low-level slot at Channel Ten in Los Angeles. This time the man was the station manager at Channel Ten, Mike Tomlinson. She was grateful for the second chance, and when he asked her out, she went. While they got to know each other better, she even had hopes that they were going to have a nice relationship. But when Tomlinson felt comfortable enough to be frank with her, he told her he expected her to be attentive to his wishes. The next time he asked her out, it was to his apartment. She refused.

Mike Tomlinson said simply, “Okay.” At first she was relieved. He reverted to being perfectly professional. He met with her only in company with other people, and issued orders to the group together so everyone would know what the others were doing. The rest of the time he never spoke to her. Messages came through underlings and colleagues. Things stayed that way for two years.

She was thirty-three years old by then, and she understood. The stories she was assigned were the same sort she had been doing as a beginner in Charlotte, and less important than the ones she had done in Kentucky. She was still doing some modeling, but as she aged, there were fewer offers.

The Fourth of July came on a weekend that year, so the holiday was celebrated on the following Monday. She switched with Claudia Shin so she could do Claudia’s Friday early broadcast and take what amounted to a four-day weekend. She drove to San Diego and checked in at the Hotel del Coronado. She liked it because Channel Ten wasn’t shown in San Diego. People who saw her on the beach seldom recognized her.

She spent two days lying on the beach—always under an umbrella and wearing 100 SPF sunscreen—walking vast distances morning and evening with her feet in the surf, and thinking. She evaluated her life. She had been a television newswoman for over ten years, and she was still about at the level where she started. She was skilled enough and she was still beautiful enough to be at the network, but her time was nearly over to qualify for the jump. If she didn’t get promoted at Channel Ten to a slot where she’d get noticed within two years, she’d have missed her chance.

After two days of thinking during the day and drinking on her balcony at night, there had been about three times when she had decided on suicide. Once she had stuck to it long enough to walk to a sporting goods store in town, bring back a nasty-looking fishing knife, and run a warm bath, but she passed out before she’d used it.

Near the end of the second day she called Mike Tomlinson, the station manager. She was told he couldn’t take her call just then, but someone would call her back in about ten minutes. His secretary had been saying that for two years. Gloria said never mind, and called the private cell phone number he had given her two years ago.

“Yes?” he said.

“This is Gloria,” she said.

“I thought you were off this week,” he said.

She closed her eyes and made her voice sound cheerful and soft. “I was sitting here on my balcony at the Hotel del Coronado wondering why you never called me again after that one time.”

He paused for a moment. Maybe he was looking at his phone to switch on a recording and protect himself.

She thought about it, but she didn’t care.

He said, “I made overtures because I was attracted to you. You made it clear you weren’t interested. Since I’m not a psycho, and didn’t want to put pressure on an employee, I’ve left you alone.”

“Well, maybe that wasn’t the last word. Maybe we should get together soon and talk about it. As I said, I’m at the Del Coronado for the next couple of days. What do you think?”

Within a month she had been promoted to weekend anchor with Todd Tedesco. When Jerry Zingler had a stroke she became a weeknight anchor, a job she’d held all the years since then. The relationship with Mike had gone on for a few years, and she had begun to think he might be planning to marry her, but then he married another woman. When that marriage ended after a few years he was with Gloria a few times, and then married a second wife. Now and then—after a Christmas party or when they were away at a conference—he still occasionally knocked on her hotel room door. She tolerated it and acted cheerful on those occasions.

She was ashamed. She hadn’t been a naïf right out of college. She had by then been a professional for over ten years. And she had been the one to suggest the arrangement. All it had taken was seeing the situation clearly. She felt she’d been driven into a dead end. She was humiliated and cheated and hated what had happened to her, what she’d had to do. And she was confused. She was a victim who was making three million dollars a year and winning awards, but she felt worthless.

At the studio today she had felt as if she was reporting her own story. She had been trying to protect that young policewoman from what happened to her. As soon as the police chief ended his press conference announcing that pig Stahl’s firing, she had begun to get nasty e-mails from viewers. Every one used the word “bitch.” The viewers all had other things to say, but that word seemed to be required.

She knew all about the demeaning crap Diane Hines was being subjected to by her wonderful new boss. Was that supposed to be tolerated from a public official? Apparently. She had begun to screen her e-mails for the word “bitch.”

Gloria got into her Ferrari, stepped on the clutch and started the engine, let the car coast backward a few feet, and then touched the brake. The bomb kicked the spinning, flaming car upward to light up the night air, turning the dead body strapped into the driver’s seat over and over with it.