Shadow of Heaven

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Stirling’s first story of the day was a routine job. The bodies of a young man and woman, hand-cuffed together, had been fished out of the Merrimack during the night. It was worth two or three paragraphs as it stood, more when he had established who and why—but nothing was working out that morning.

His best contacts at police control and the morgue were off for the day, and his second-best contacts really were second-best—probably because they were getting better sweeteners from some other newspaper. Stirling had wasted thirty minutes on futile phone calls when one of the copy girls dropped a note from the news editor, Sam McLeod, onto his desk. McLeod was a gloomy little man who, in a lifetime in the newspaper business, had put a million slips of copy through his hands, yet never failed to summon up a fresh look of savage hatred for each new sheet that was handed to him. He sat within fifteen feet of Stirling and the other city reporters, but always communicated by means of hand-written notes. This one said:

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