was going on, lights from three different cameras blinded her and a microphone was shoved into her face. A second boom mike was lowered just above her head while a young man with perfect hair stepped forward in the middle of the pack and smiled his perfect teeth at her, each one of his dental veneers every bit as bright and dazzling as the lights blazing forth from the cameras. The powerful lights sliced through the foggy winter air with all the efficiency of a paper cut, stabbing Dana’s thoroughly shocked brain via her woefully unprepared eyeballs.
Dana blinked rapidly against the blinding lights and counted the number of figures huddled in a rough semi-circle around Colgate’s poster boy. Four. The lead reporter had come with a full crew in tow, and why not? This story could be his ticket out of Cleveland and onto bigger and better things. Los Angeles, perhaps. Maybe even New York City itself – the holy grail of TV news.
‘Agent Whitestone,’ the man said with a melodramatic flair that he’d no doubt been practicing in front of his bathroom mirror each and every night for the past five years now, refining it and redefining it until it sounded as smooth as processed honey, both to his own ears and to the ears of his viewers. ‘Brent Price, Channel Four News. You walked right past us at the hospital, didn’t you?’
The reporter narrowed his bright blue eyes beneath his carefully coiffed brown hair to let Dana know she’d been caught red-handed and there was nowhere left for her to hide. ‘Didn’t you?’ he repeated.
Dana forced back a swell of anger in her chest. Wasn’t easy. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr Price,’ she said, putting her head down and hustling past the journalists, making a beeline for her car parked forty-five feet away. She really didn’t have time for this crap right now. Having never been anything less than a total gentleman a day in his entire life, Gary Templeton would no doubt be waiting for her on the kerb downtown, and Dana didn’t want to keep the Cleveland cop standing out there in the cold any longer than she absolutely needed to.
Not that she was going to get off the hook that easily, of course.
The newsman laughed and shuffled his feet to block Dana’s path, slipping momentarily on a patch of black ice beneath his brown dress shoes and temporarily losing his balance. Flinging out his arms wildly to his sides, Price regained his equilibrium quickly, but otherwise looked like an adult who was attempting to ride a skateboard for the first time in his life. Still, once he’d regained his balance, Price acted as though nothing had happened at all. Not even a single flicker of acknowledgement on his handsome face that he’d come perilously close to smashing out all his pretty veneers against the hard ground.
Dana watched all this unfold in amazement. Not a single hair on Price’s head had moved out of place despite his near-fall and the fact that the healthy wind swirling around the parking lot called to mind a certain famous fictional tornado that had once dropped an entire house on a wicked witch sporting ruby-red slippers.
Dana shook her head in bewilderment. No matter how long she lived, she knew she’d never understand where TV folks got all their confidence from. Still, she highly doubted it came from industrial-strength hairspray or ten pounds of pancake make-up. No, it was something else. Maybe a complete lack of self-awareness, an utter inability to step outside your own body and view yourself through the eyes of others. A complete lack of the self-consciousness Dana seemed to have been born with. Whatever it was, though, Dana knew that she could probably use some more of it herself. A lot more of it. She hated knowing that she didn’t even trust herself any more. How in the hell could she expect other people to trust her?
And in her job, trust was everything.
Still – much like a cat’s love – trust was something that needed to be earned. Or, in her case, earned back. Starting with Gary Templeton and Christian Manhoff’s grieving family. No matter how hard it might seem to accomplish, Dana knew she needed to regroup mentally, to show everybody she hadn’t cracked, that she was still capable of doing her job properly. And maybe, just maybe, even excelling at it every once in a while.
‘Sure you don’t know what I’m