The Hornet’s Nest. Patricia Cornwell

looking at graceful antebellum buildings of ivy and brick, at the Chambers classroom

building with its dome, and the indoor tennis center where he had battled other college

students as if losing meant death. He had spent his life fighting for the right to move

ahead eighteen miles, along 1-77, to South Tryon Street, in the heart of the city, where he

could write for a living. He remembered when he first started driving to Charlotte when

he was sixteen, when the skyline was simple, downtown a place to go. Now it seemed an

over achieving stone and glass empire that kept growing. He wasn’t sure he liked it much

anymore. He wasn’t sure it liked him, either.

Mile eight, he dropped in the grass and began plunging into push-ups.

Arms were strong and sculpted, with veins that gracefully fed his strength. Hair on wet

skin was gold, his face red. He rolled over on his back and breathed good air, enjoying

the afterglow. Slowly, he sat up, stretching, easing himself into the vertical position that

meant getting on with it.

Andy Brazil trotted back to his twenty-five year-old black BMW 2002 parked on the

street. It was waxed, and shellacked with Armor All, the original blue and white emblem

on the hood worn off forever ago and lovingly retouched with model paint. The car had

almost a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it, and something broke about once a

month, but Brazil could fix anything. Inside, the interior was saddle leather, and there

was a new police scanner and a two-way radio. He wasn’t due on his beat until four, but

he rolled into his very own spot- at noon. He was the Observer’s police reporter and got

to park in a special spot near the door, so he could take off in a hurry when trouble blew.

The instant he entered the lobby, he smelled newsprint and ink the way a creature smells

blood. The scent excited him like police lights and sirens, and he was happy because the

guard in the console didn’t make him sign in anymore. Brazil took the escalator, trotting

up moving rhetal stairs, as if he was late somewhere. People were statues coming down

the other side. They glanced curiously at him. Everyone in the Observer newsroom

knew who Brazil was, and he had no friends.

The newsroom was big and drab, filled with the sounds of keys clicking, phones ringing,

and printers grabbing fast-breaking stories off the wire. Reporters were intense in front of

computer screens, flipping through notepads with the paper’s name on cardboard covers.

They walked around, and the woman who covered local politics was running out the door

after a scoop. Brazil still could not believe he was a player in this important, heady

world, where words could change destinies and the way people thought. He thrived on

drama, perhaps because he had been fed it since birth, although not generally in a good

way.

His new desk was in the metro section, just beyond the glass-enclosed office of the

publisher, Panesa, who Brazil liked and was desperate to impress. Panesa was a

handsome man, with silver-blond hair, and a lean look that had not become less striking

as he had skated beyond forty.

The publisher stood tall and straight in fine suits dark blue or black, and wore cologne.

Brazil thought Panesa wise but had no reason to know it yet.

Each Sunday, Panesa had a column in the Sunday paper, and women in the greater

Charlotte area wrote fan letters and secretly wondered what Richard Panesa was like in

bed, or at least Brazil imagined this was so. Panesa was in a meeting when Brazil sat

behind his desk and covertly glanced into the publisher’s transparent kingdom as Brazil

tried to look busy opening notepads, drawers, glancing at old printouts of long-published

stories. It did not escape Panesa’s notice that his boyish, intense police reporter had arrived four hours early his first day on his new beat. Panesa was not surprised.

The first item on Brazil’s agenda was that Tommy Axel had left another 7-Eleven rose on

Brazil’s desk. It had the sad, unhealthy complexion of the people who shopped in