I was sitting at the city desk, halfway through my first cup of cafeteria coffee, when I saw him. His jacket was flapping, his arms flailing, as he sprinted along the computer terminals and zigzagged past three-foot piles of newspapers, eyes trained on the prize -- a big sign that said METRO, under which I sat, scanning the wires on a slow Saturday morning.

You might think that with all those deadline pressures, newsrooms would be kinetic places where people leapt and darted and yelled all day long. Maybe they do at other places, but here at the Los Angeles Times, the only place I've ever worked, such displays are considered a mark of poor breeding.

I'd never seen anyone run in the newsroom and wasn't sure what to make of it. But up he came, skidding to a stop before me, white bubbles foaming at the corners of his mouth. He wore a tweed cap, which he took off and ran along his forehead to swab up the sweat pearling at his hairline. Then he placed the cap over his chest like he was pledging allegiance.

"Miss, you've got to help me look for her. The police won't do anything until forty-eight hours have passed. But something's dreadfully wrong, I feel it here."

His cap flapped weakly against his chest.

"Look for who?" I cast around for someone who could wrestle him to the ground if it came down to that, but it wasn't yet eight o'clock and the newsroom was empty. How had he gotten past security downstairs?

"My daughter. Isabel," the man said. His face tightened, and he looked over his shoulder. "She's been missing since yesterday. I think I know where she is, but I don't want to go alone. The press should be there. Please, miss, are you a reporter? Will you come with me?"

He must have heard how unhinged he sounded, because he shoved his hand into his pants pocket, rooted around for a wallet, and pulled out his driver's license.

"Vincent Chevalier," he said, holding it up with a trembling hand. "I'm a sound engineer. Done all of Jackson Browne's records since Late for the Sky."

He looked at me. "Of course, you're too young to remember that one. I know what you're thinking. That I could be an ax murderer."

Damn straight, I thought, inching away my chair.

"I know I sound crazy, and I am -- I'm crazed about what might be happening to my daughter. Please, miss, we have to hurry."

He craned his head again, and this time, I did too. We heard yelling and the pounding of feet.

"He went that way. There he is, get him."

For the second time in my career, I saw people running in the newsroom. This time it was two security guards, charging straight for the city desk. Was I going to be on the news myself tonight? The guards pounded up, each seizing one of Chevalier's arms.

"He flashed an ID at the door," one of them said, "but it didn't look right so I told him to wait. Then he ran up the stairs. I had to radio for backup before leaving my post."

The guard saw me staring at him, and then at the man he had apprehended much too late to save anyone. He shifted from one foot to the other and hooked his thumb into his thick black belt.

"We only have a skeleton crew on the weekends since budget cutbacks," he mumbled. "C'mon, you." He jerked the captive's arm roughly to show him who was boss. "Out we go."

An anguished howl leapt from Vincent Chevalier's throat. "Isabel," he bellowed. Then the fight went out of him and he began to weep. "And what if it was your daughter? Wouldn't you do everything you could?"

It wouldn't be my daughter, I thought, because I don't have a daughter. But if I did, I'd keep closer tabs on her than you obviously have. "Late for the Sky" indeed. But something about his tone got to me.

"Wait a minute," I said. "He came up here wanting to talk to a reporter. Let's hear what he has to say."

Reluctantly, the guards stepped back. Vincent Chevalier's face took on a cautious, cunning look. He knew he had one chance and he'd better not flub it.

"My daughter is only fifteen, but she's precocious. We live in a nice part of Pasadena, prep school and all that, but in the last year she's gotten restless. Started hanging out with an edgier crowd. Some of them are runaways, and she brings them food and warm clothes. They squat in abandoned buildings. There's a young man she's been trying to help. He gives me the creeps but I keep my mouth shut. I don't want to drive them closer. They've been on and off for months. Yesterday she said she was going to visit a girlfriend and would be home for dinner. She never showed."

He looked at us, anxiety mounting in his eyes. "I want someone to go to the squat with me."

"Why can't you check it out by yourself?" I asked.

Vincent Chevalier twitched his cap up and down against his fleecy sweater. He was slight and couldn't have stood more than five foot eight inches tall. "Last time I saw Finch, that's her squatter friend, he threatened me."

"Sounds like you need a bodyguard, not a puny girl reporter."

He stared at me. His silvery-black hair was curly and wet, plastered against his pale skull, except for one unruly lock that fell forward into his eyes.

"What I really need is the police, but they won't come. They've been there with me before, when she's run away. They don't take my calls seriously anymore. But if the press noses around, maybe they will. I don't want to go by myself. I want a witness."

"Where is this squat?"

Something about his story gnawed at me. His daughter had been hanging out with a disturbed runaway in some abandoned building and he didn't put a stop to it? And now he wanted me to help find her? Yet desperation rolled off him in big, crashing waves. He was bewildered in that way honest people get when they find themselves spinning into madness. And he had already tried the police. I suppose that counted for something.

"East Hollywood," he said. "You can follow me in your car."

I scrolled through the wires again to see what else was going on in the city. All over town, people were dying violently -- shot in dead-end bars, withdrawing money from ATMs, working the night shift in liquor stores, and playing hopscotch on the corner. Usually, we waited until Sunday, when the final tally came in, then did a roundup. Unless the victims were rich, prominent, or had met their end in some horribly unusual and tragic way, they got folded into the main story as smoothly as egg whites into cake. So far the wires were at fourteen and counting. As for scheduled events, there was a Mexican concert and All-Star Rodeo in La Puente at noon. The mayoral candidates were debating at the Century Plaza Hotel. Vietnam vets were demonstrating in front of the federal building at three o'clock. It was a slow news day.

Vincent Chevalier tapped his black suede sneaker impatiently. I focused on its agitated dance. It could be a great story. I pictured the headline, strategically placed in the paper's coveted Column One slot. DANCE WITH THE DARK SIDE -- BORED RICH GIRLS SEEK ULTIMATE THRILLS SLUMMING WITH HOMELESS RUNAWAYS. But if he wasn't on the level? I looked around. The other 8 A.M. reporter was just strolling in, carrying his designer coffee in its corrugated paper holder. He was a Princeton graduate who had studied with Tom Wolfe and achieved notoriety when his senior thesis, a literary deconstruction of speed metal songs, had been published to great acclaim. I had gone to a state school and jostled with 250 students in a drafty auditorium for the attention of some postdoc lassoed into teaching Journalism 101.

Chevalier was watching my colleague too.

"Is he a reporter?" Chevalier inclined his chin. "Maybe a man would be better."

That settled it.

"Can I see your ID again?" I said sweetly. Chevalier handed it over and I typed all his stats into the computer. Then I compared his license photo with the face before me. A few more lines, a certain tautness around the mouth, but it was him all right. I got his home and work phone and typed that in too, leaving a note for the early editor, who was still upstairs in the caf eating breakfast and perusing our competitor the Daily News to see what stories we had missed. I would be back way before noon if they needed me to cover one of the wire events. But that was all canned, predictable stuff, while the foot-tapping Vincent Chevalier was dangling some very live bait. I made a printout of what I had just typed, tucked the cell phone into my purse, and told the guards they could return to their post.

In the parking lot, Chevalier and I turned to look at each other. In the milky light of a fall morning, I blinked and wondered why I was embarking on a human scavenger hunt to find his daughter.

Chevalier fingered the bill of his tweed cap, then stuck it squarely back on his head. "I'm a single father, you know, and it's been tough since she hit adolescence. She's constantly challenging authority. I understand that, since I was a rebel myself. So I keep the lines of communication open, like the books say. I tell her I love her and I'm there for her and then I let her go. She runs away a lot. Once she was gone for three months. Don't look at me like that, she'd call. Tell me where she was, what she was up to. Tucson, Kansas City, New Orleans. It made me feel better, knowing where she was. She's always come back. Until now."

Yikes, I thought. Mister, she's a fifteen-year-old girl. She needs you to lay down the law, and instead you hand her a Kerouac novel and wish her good luck.

"We'll find her," I told him, keeping my parenting lesson to myself.

Copyright © 2003 by Denise Hamilton