The Reporter Who Answers at 2 A.M.
Benefits office put him on hold four times before a recording told him call volumes were "higher than usual" and hung up on him. Roland believed that. He just didn't believe it was a coincidence.
He didn't sleep. He sat at the kitchen table with three blurry photos and Elena's old pension folder pulled out of the hall closet — the one where a younger Corrigan, the founder's son, had signed a company newsletter promising *"Larkspur takes care of the people who built it. That is not a policy. That is who we are."*
He didn't know what to do with truth like that except try to make it matter to somebody.
He knew the name Naomi Ostrander from a story eight months back — she'd broken a piece on a shipping company skimming worker comp claims, the kind of story that made people at the plant say *good, somebody finally.* Her contact page had an email address and a line: *Tips are read personally. If it's real, I answer.*
He typed for forty minutes and deleted it twice before he sent three photos and four sentences with no name attached.
Her reply came back at 1:52 a.m.
*This is either the best tip I've had in three years or the most elaborate hoax anyone's ever built for a joke. Either way I need to see you in person. Somewhere that isn't email. Tonight if you're still awake — I am.*
He sat with the message a long time, the porch light still burning outside for a woman who wasn't coming home to see it.
Finally he typed back an address — the diner two blocks from his building, open all night, the kind of place nobody from the fourteenth floor would ever set foot in.
Then he got up to check the front door was locked, pulled the blinds back an inch out of habit — and stopped.
A black SUV he didn't recognize sat parked across the street, engine running, headlights off.