He bent down and scooped tap water into his mouth until his thirst was no longer raging, then ducked his head under the faucet. He shook water from his hair and dried his face with paper towels. With one more nod toward respectability, he buttoned his shirt as he was walking back to his office.

She was still there. Which didn’t come as that much of a surprise. She looked the type that didn’t give up easily.

Before he could order her out, she said, “Why would you object to The Major giving an interview?”

“It’s no skin off my nose, but he won’t do it, and I think you already know that or you wouldn’t have come to me, because I’m the last person on the planet who could convince him to do anything.”

“Why is that?”

He recognized that cleverly laid trap for what it was and didn’t step into it. “Let me guess. I’m your last resort?” Her expression was as good as an admission. “Before coming to me, how many times did you ask The Major yourself?”

“I’ve called him thirteen times.”

“How many times did he hang up on you?”

“Thirteen.”

“Rude bastard.”

Under her breath, she said, “It must be a family trait.”

Trapper only smiled. “It’s the only one he and I have in common.” He studied her for a moment. “You get points for tenacity. Most give up long before thirteen attempts. Who do you work for?”

“A network O and O—owned and operated—in Dallas.”

“You’re on TV? In Dallas?”

“I do feature stories. Human interest, things like that. Occasionally one makes it to the network’s Sunday evening news show.”

Trapper was familiar with the program, but he didn’t remember ever having watched it.

He knew for certain that he’d never seen her, not even on the local station, or he would’ve remembered. She had straight, sleek light brown hair with blonder streaks close to her face. Brown eyes as large as a doe’s. One inch below the outside corner of the left one was a beauty mark the same dark chocolate color as her irises. Her complexion was creamy, her lips plump and pink, and he was reluctant to pull his gaze away from them.

But he did. “Sorry, but you drove over here for nothing.”

“Mr. Trapper—”

“You’re wasting your time. The Major retired from public life years ago.”

“Three to be exact. And he didn’t merely retire. He went into seclusion. Why do you think he did that?”

“My guess is that he got sick of talking about it.”

“What about you?”

“I was sick of it long before that.”

“How old were you?”

“At the time of the bombing? Eleven. Fifth grade.”

“Your father’s sudden celebrity must have affected you.”

“Not really.”

She watched him for a moment, then said softly, “That’s impossible. It had to have impacted your life as dramatically as it did his.”

He squinted one eye. “You know what this sounds like? Leading questions, like you’re trying to interview me. In which case, you’re SOL because I’m not going to talk about The Major, or me, or my life. Ever. Not to anybody.”

She reached into the oversize bag and took out an eight-by-ten reproduction of a photograph, laid it on the desk, and pushed it toward him.

Without even glancing down at it, he pushed it back. “I’ve seen it.” For the second time, he stood up, went to the door and opened it, stood there with hands on hips, waiting.

She hesitated, then sighed with resignation, hiked the strap of her bag onto her shoulder, and joined him at the door. “I caught you at a bad time.”

“No, this is about as good as I get.”

“Would you consider meeting me later, after you’ve had time to …” She made a gesture that encompassed his sorry state.“To feel better. I could outline what I want to do. We could talk about it over dinner.”

“Nothing to talk about.”

“I’m paying.”

He shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

She gnawed the inside of her cheek as though trying to determine which tactic to use to try to persuade him. He could offer some salacious suggestions, but she probably wouldn’t go that far, and even if she did, afterward he’d still say no to her request.

She took a look around the office before coming back to him. With the tip of her index finger, she underlined the words stenciled on the frosted glass of the door. “Private Investigator.”

“So it says.”

“Your profession is to investigate things, solve mysteries.”

He snuffled. That was his former profession. Nowadays, he was retained by tearful wives wanting him to confirm that their husbands were screwing around. If he managed to get pictures, it doubled his fee. Distraught parents paid him to track down runaway teens, whom he usually found exchanging alleyway blowjobs for heroin.

He wouldn’t call the work he was doing mystery-solving. Or investigation, for that matter.

But to her, he said, “Fort Worth’s own Sherlock Holmes.”

“Are you state licensed?”

“Oh, yeah. I have a gun, bullets, everything.”

“Do you have a magnifying glass?”

The question baffled him because she hadn’t asked it in jest. She was serious. “What for?”

Those pouty pink lips fashioned an enigmatic smile, and she whispered, “Figure it out.”

Keeping her eyes on his, she reached into an inside pocket of her bag and withdrew a business card. She didn’t hand it to him, but stuck it in a crack between the frosted glass pane and the door frame, adjacent to the words that spelled out his job description.

“When you change your mind, my cell number is on the card.”

Hell would freeze over first.

Trapper slammed the office door behind her, plucked the business card from the slit, and flipped it straight into the trash can.

Eager to go home and sleep off the remainder of his hangover in a more comfortable surrounding, he snatched up the sock on the armrest of the sofa and went in search of the other.

After several frustrating minutes and a litany of elaborate profanity, he found it inside one of his boots. He pulled on his socks but decided he needed an aspirin before he finished dressing. Padding over to his desk, he opened the lap drawer in the hope of discovering a forgotten bottle of analgesics.

That damned photograph was there in plain sight where he couldn’t miss it.

But whether looking at it, or acknowledging it in any manner, or even denying its existence, he was never truly free of it. He had lied to Kerra Bailey. His life was never the same after that photograph went global twenty-five years ago.

Trapper plopped down into his desk chair and looked at the cursed thing. His head hurt, his eyes were scratchy, his throat and mouth were still parched. But even realizing that it was masochistic, he reached across the desk and slid the photo closer to him.

Everyone in the entire world had seen it at least once over the past quarter century. Among prize-winning, defining-moment editorial photographs, it ranked right up there with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-E Day, the naked Vietnamese girl running from napalm, the twin towers of the World Trade center aflame and crumbling.

But before 9/11, there was the Pegasus Hotel bombing in downtown Dallas. It had rocked a city still trying to live down the Kennedy assassination, had destroyed a landmark building, had snuffed out the lives of 197 people. Half that number had been critically injured.

Major Franklin Trapper had led a handful of struggling survivors out of the smoldering rubble to safety.

A photographer who worked for one of Dallas’s newspapers had been eating a Danish at his desk in the city room when the first bombs detonated. The blast deafened him. The concussion shook his building and created cracks in the aggregate floor beneath his desk. Windows shattered.

But like an old fire horse, he was conditioned to run toward a disaster. He snatched up his camera, bolted down three flights of fire stairs, and, upon exiting the newspaper building, dashed toward the source of the black plume of smoke that had already engulfed the skyline.