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"You have to get out of here, Mickey, you know that," Lieutenant Wrigley said.

"Yeah."

"Do me a favor," Wrigley said. "Go out the back door. Otherwise the rest of the media will bitch you're getting special treatment again."

"Yeah, sure, Stan."

"You get a pretty good look at the doers?" the detective asked.

"Not good. Two young black guys, one of them short and fat."

"You told that to Carter?" Wrigley asked.

Mickey nodded.

"Thanks, Mick," Wrigley said, and O'Hara went to the rear door of the kitchen and went through it.

[THREE]

Twelve minutes later, Mickey O'Hara walked into his glass-walled office just off the city room of the Philadelphia Bulletin, adjusted the venetian blinds over the glass of the windows and doors so that he could not be seen from the city room, locked the door, and then sat down at his personal computer, switched it on, and waited for it to boot up.

He had two computers. One was tied into the Bulletin's network, and the other was his personally. While he was waiting for his personal computer to boot up, he spun around in his chair and faced the Bulletin computer terminal keyboard and rapidly typed:

CE

Hold me space for the double murder at the Roy Rogers.

I was there and may have pics.

O'Hara

He read what he had typed, then pushed the Send key.

Then he spun around in his chair again and faced his own computer. This state-of-the-art device, which fell under the provisions of his contract for personal services with the Bulletin, requiring the Bulletin to provide him with "whatever electronic devices and other tools he considered necessary to the efficient performance of his duties," was brand new. It had a twenty-one-inch liquid crystal diode color monitor, and provided more than a hundred different typefaces, each clearer and more legible than the single typeface available on the Bulletin's computer terminals.

Mickey took his digital camera--another $1,200 electronic device he considered necessary for the performance of his duties--from his trouser pocket, carefully removed the memory chip, replaced it with another $79.95 64-megabyte memory chip, and shoved the chip he had removed into the mouth--it reminded him of a feeding goldfish--of a device connected to the keyboard of his computer.

He tapped some keys, which caused the JPG images on the memory chip to be transferred into his computer. The quick tapping of more keys brought the images up on the LCD monitor.

He then removed the memory chip from the goldfish's mouth, unlocked a drawer in his desk and unlocked a metal box in the drawer, dropped the memory chip into it, relocked it, closed the desk drawer, and relocked that.

Mickey was thinking of writing a book--Casimir Bolinski said he was sure he could sell it for him "for big bucks, Mick, if you ever get off your lazy Irish ass and write a proposal"--and if he did, he would need the pictures.

He tapped keys again and a photo-editing program came up on the LCD monitor's screen. The first picture, of the two black guys coming out of the Roy Rogers, appeared.

It was really a lousy picture, understandable in the circumstances.

For one thing, he had thrown the viewfinder to his eye with such haste that the picture was cockeyed; the two doers appeared in the lower right quarter of the picture, and only from the waist up.

Far worse, the camera's internal light meter had detected the bright light coming from the door, decided that was the ambient light, and set the camera accordingly. The entrance to the restaurant appeared in near perfect clarity, but the two doers were not in the light from the door, and consequently they could hardly be seen. You could see it was two guys, but you couldn't see any facial details.

Mickey quite skillfully tried to fix it, using all of the capabilities of the photo-editing program. He "lightened" the two guys. That didn't work. Neither did darkening the perfectly captured restaurant entrance. He tried everything else he could think of,