By A Spider's Thread

Chapter Nine

Tess-I know it's commonly believed that Jewish dietary law was nothing more than a series of sensible precautions developed in response to foods that carried risks-trichinosis in pork, for example. But Jewish law is more subtle than that, Tess, and trying to reduce its tenets to mere pragmatic considerations robs it of its deep philosophical underpinnings.

Take the tradition of the mikveh , which has gone by the wayside even in some Orthodox families. It is not the misogynistic, female-phobic practice some would have you believe. The rationale for abstinence is not that women are "unclean" but that the days following the prohibition is when they're at their most fertile . For further insight into your new client, I strongly recommend you read Herman Wouk's This Is My God .

Ask a question, get an answer. So far the SnoopSisters had few concrete ideas about how to find Natalie Rubin and her children. But Tess's casual question about Mark Rubin's refusal to shake her hand had started a lively thread, with posts from Susan Friend in Omaha, who could always be counted on to provide the historic and intellectual overview of any topic, and Jessie Ray in Houston, who reminded the SnoopSisters that Texas husbands once had carte blanche to execute men who trespassed on their land or their women. And now this gently chiding missive from Margie Lynn in Southern California.

I read Marjorie Morningstar as a teenager, Tess typed back. Do I get half credit for that?

The sun was barely up, and Tess was in bed, her laptop balanced on her knees, the greyhound stretched across the foot of the bed like a lumpy quilt, the Doberman on the floor. Since Crow had left for Virginia to help his mother through her chemo and recovery, Tess had allowed the dog to take his place, but Esskay was a poor substitute for a number of reasons. She didn't give back rubs, and she wouldn't spoon. And her breath remained as vile as the day Tess had met her, despite changes to her diet and a tooth-cleaning regimen that required Tess to don a rubber fingertip and scrub each fang individually.

No wonder Tess didn't get manicures more often. Using one's fingers as a greyhound's toothbrush did not keep nails in tip-top shape. She wondered if Kitty's growing obsession with her wedding would lead her to a keener interest in Tess's grooming. Almost without thinking, she shared these thoughts with the SnoopSisters. This morning check-in had become a ritual of sorts, making her feel as if she had human company while sipping her first cup of coffee.

A first yesterday, interview-by-manicure. Makes it hard to take notes, but it also makes it difficult for the person you're questioning to walk away. Riddle me this: Why do Baltimore 's manicurists tend to be Russian, when they're Korean almost everywhere else? No, never mind, I'm sure I'm showing my cultural/ethnic ignorance all over again, possibly being racist.

At any rate, I'm lucky I could focus on the interview at all. Tyner Gray, the lawyer for whom I've worked off and on, dropped a bombshell over lunch. He's going to marry my aunt. They've lived together for almost two years, but I find this discombobularing for some reason. Perhaps because I've been instructed to wear a dress and warned that my aunt, a once-sensible woman, is now a giddy bride-to-be with visions of bows and peplums and handkerchief hems. I'm not even sure what a peplum is, but I know one of you will enlighten me.

She stopped to admire her hands. Well, hand. Lana had done a superb job on the left; the right one bore the marks of the rush job that it had become once Tess's questions grew sharper. She sent the e-mail off, feeling extremely productive. How many people went through their in-box at sunrise, then spent an hour rowing?

Almost as soon as her e-mail vanished, her computer trilled back at her, and an instant message popped up on her screen. No-nonsense Gretchen, up even earlier in Chicago, had some on-topic advice:

Sorry, just saw your request to the digest. (I get it as individual e-mails.) When I was a city cop, there was a woman coming up behind me, Nancy Porter, very good police, who ended up leaving the department about the same time I did. She's out in the county, in Homicide. Call her, use my name. If there's something hubby isn't telling you, she'll share.

You're a gem, Gretchen, Tess typed, making a note of the office and pager numbers that Gretchen had enclosed for the detective.

Tell me something I don't know.

Tess promptly disconnected from the Internet and dialed the work number, assuming she would get voice mail. But the detective had just arrived at her desk, showing up early for the seven-to-three shift. Tess thought such a seemingly ambitious county Homicide cop, who saw perhaps one case for every thirty the city worked, would be up for any distraction, but Detective Nancy Porter was reticent to the point of rudeness until Tess dropped Gretchen's name. Then she was just reticent.

"Yeah, I know about the Rubin family," she said. She had a high, clear voice, almost little-girlish. "Family Crimes worked it, but the detective ran a lot of the stuff by me because I've done some missing-kid work. It's interesting, a stone-cold whydunit. It's just not a criminal case."

"I'm curious to know why the department is so sure of that."

Nancy didn't answer right away. She didn't answer any questions right away, and while her cautious manner made Tess impatient, it also struck her as admirable. She should try it herself sometime, thinking before she spoke.

"At the risk of sounding paranoid, I don't like talking on the phone with people I don't really know," the detective said at last. "I've got to go down to Northern District in the city this morning, so I'll grab a late breakfast with you in Hampden. That's near your house, right?"

"How do you know where I live?"

"Caller ID. I can match almost every prefix in the city with the neighborhood. I'm guessing you're north of Cold Spring but west of Charles."

Tess was impressed. This was a geek after her own heart.

"So if you're meeting with me, you've got something to tell me."

"I know a little bit. I'm not sure it will help you find the Rubin family, but it will give you some perspective you'll need if you're going to work for this guy."

Tess's mind raced. "Is Mark Rubin concealing something from me? Did Natalie Rubin have to disappear for a reason? Was she-"

"Later." The girlish voice was surprisingly firm. "I'll answer all your questions the best I can when we meet."

Chapter Ten

TESS STOPPED OFF AT THE HAMPDEN POST OFFICE BEFORE her late-breakfast meeting with Nancy Porter, sending three certified letters to the Mail Boxes Etc. store that Lana had visited. Each one contained a card with a typed message, one for Lana and two for Natalie, addressed to both Rubin and Peters: I know what you're doing. Call me. She used her second cell-phone number, the one that couldn't be traced to her. But just getting either of the Natalie letters accepted at the address would be a key piece of information.

The morning was bright and breezy, and Nancy Porter had taken one of the two porch tables at the Golden West, a restaurant carved out of a row house on Thirty-sixth Street, aka the Avenue. Long the main business artery in the working-class neighborhood of Hampden, the Avenue had become hip in spite of itself, bringing in the usual mix of cafes, galleries, and shops. Tess's personal favorite was Ma Petite Shoe, an establishment that sold only chocolate and shoes. That pretty much met all her needs, although most of the shoes tended to be on the girly side.

"I'm glad you were okay with meeting here," Nancy said, rising to shake Tess's hand. "I'm on a low-carb diet, and they have the best huevos rancheros, which almost make up for the fact that I can't have the tortillas."

Tess sized up the detective. She appeared a year or two younger than Tess and only a few pounds heavier, although those pounds were packed on a shorter, finer-boned frame. Men probably didn't mind Nancy's weight as much as she did. She had an all-American-girl cuteness, and the wedding band on her left hand would seem to indicate she didn't lack for companionship.

"Well, we're the perfect dining companions, then," Tess said.

"You're doing low carb, too?"

"No, but I love huevos rancheros, and I'll happily eat your tortillas along with mine."

Nancy favored her with a crooked grin. "I hate women like you. You can probably eat anything you want and not worry about it."

"Oh, I could worry about it, but what's the point? I accept my height and shoe size, my eye color and my hair color. I might as well live in the body I was born with, too."

"You can change your hair and your eyes, though."

"Would you?" Tess challenged the blue-eyed blonde.

Nancy laughed, shaking her head. "Gretchen said you were funny. Said you'd talk my ear off about nonessential stuff, too, but she swears you're a good investigator when you aren't being all philosophical."

"You talked to Gretchen?"

The blue eyes in that baby face had a knowing spark. "Oh, yeah, as soon as I hung with you. Woke her up, too. Sorry, but there was no way I was going to take your word for anything. I've gotten burned a time or two, talking to people I shouldn't. For all I knew, you were a reporter. In fact, Gretchen said you used to be."

"I've been a private investigator almost as long as I worked as a reporter." Tess paused, surprised by her own stat. She double-checked her arithmetic. Three years at the Star before it folded, now going on three years as a licensed PI. "And I wasn't much of a reporter. I was so far down the fourth-estate food chain that I was plankton."

"If you say so. Anyway, Gretchen vouched for you, and she's as tough on people as I am. So here I am. What can I tell you?"

"Did you work the Rubin case?"

"There is no Rubin case, as far as the department is concerned. And I hope he's not trying to say there is. Family Crimes checked it very thoroughly. His wife walked out, taking their kids. No sign of foul play. And until he gets a custody order, which he says he doesn't want to do, no laws broken."

"That's pretty much how he tells it. But I was curious about the fact that her credit cards have been dormant since she left. Isn't that suggestive of foul play? How can she be on the run without any money?"

"Didn't he tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

Another knowing smile. Nancy might be younger than Tess, but she had more experience listening to people's lies.

"Mark Rubin kept his wife on a short, tight leash when it came to money. She had credit cards for everything she needed, and an ATM-Visa card, but he didn't let her have more than a hundred dollars in cash. Plus, he made her account for her cash day by day. Withdrawals, too. At the end of the month, he went over everything again, item by item."

"I don't get it. That would make her more likely to use the credit cards, right?"

"Not if she doesn't want him to know where she is. So she figured out a way to get around his system, get enough cash to hit the road."

"How?"

"Oh, she's shrewd. Rubin withdrew his cash for the week every Monday, and he seldom went to the machine again before the week was out. So she figured she had five days before he would notice that the balances were off. All she had to do was lie to him, not show him the slips at night. Starting the Monday before she left, she went to the ATM every day and withdrew five hundred dollars. That gave her twenty-five hundred."

"Decent seed money, but it won't take you far, not with three kids."

"She wasn't done. She bought some high-end electronics on one of the credit cards, stuff that Rubin can't find in his house. Probably sold it for twenty cents on the dollar through a friend, or a fence. We figure she got at least another thousand pulling that scam. And then, the day before she left, she deposited a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, to cover what she had taken. I guess she was worried he could come after her for theft, even though it was a joint account."

"Where'd she get the check?"

"It was a personal check signed by Lana Wishnia."

"She's a manicurist. Where does a manicurist get twenty-five hundred bucks to lend?"

Nancy nodded approvingly. "You are good. Rubin didn't know about her at all, and he thinks Natalie was just her client, but I think different. Lana told detectives the check was to repay some loans Natalie gave her over the years. My hunch is that Lana Wishnia was the fence, but it's legal, right? No law against buying electronics and selling them cheap."

"Why didn't Natalie just write herself a big check on the joint account, wipe out the whole thing?"

Nancy cocked an eyebrow, a trick that Tess had never mastered. "Because the bank had instructions to call Mr. Rubin if Natalie wrote a check for cash for any amount over five hundred dollars."

"Did anyone ask Rubin about his, um, strict household bookkeeping?"

"Absolutely. You see behavior that controlling, and you have to wonder-how else is this guy controlling his wife? Detectives checked 911 logs to see if the Rubin residence was known for calling in domestics. It came up clean, but in that community that's not unusual."

"What do you mean, 'that community'?" Tess's tone was sharp, her Irish roots forgotten. She was suddenly 100 percent Weinstein, and the girl on the other side of the table was just another bigoted shiksa. Never mind that Tess herself had basically asked Rubin when he stopped beating his wife. That was different.

"Look, I was posted to Northwest in the city before I came to the county. I know that the Orthodox like to take care of their problems when possible, whether it's the elderly or drugs or domestic abuse."

"All communities should do as good a job of caring for their own," Tess said, still feeling self-righteous.

"No question. But the downside to keeping problems all in the family is that there's no paper trail when a situation gets out of hand. If you don't get the batterers in the system when they start, then sometimes you can't clamp down on them when their behavior becomes truly life-threatening."

"I don't see Mark Rubin as an abuser."

"Neither do I. But I can be definite on this point because we looked into it. We also checked to see if there had been any accusations of sex abuse, if the school had noticed anything in the oldest kid's behavior. Look, we even had to consider if Mark Rubin was some criminal mastermind who'd murdered his whole family, then played the part of the grieving husband. The fact that he hired you is only further proof that he's in the clear."

"Or an expensive bluff."

Tess was thinking of the pregnant woman who had become a national sensation a while back. Her husband hadn't been the most persuasive grieving spouse in the world, though, given that he was an adulterer who put their house on the market and sold the family car within a month of her disappearance. Rubin was much more convincing in his agony.

"You said you know the detective in Family Crimes who worked this. What's her take on it?"

"Maria says if Mark Rubin had anything to do with this, he's the biggest, two-faced Bluebeard ever. No one has a bad word to say about the guy. Employees, people in his congregation, neighbors. Even ex-employees, and you know what they're like. Everyone agrees he's a great guy. Although they say it as if it were a little bit of a surprise."

"Really?"

"Yeah, the older ladies at his synagogue, the ones who had known him since he was a kid, kept telling Maria he was such a nice man, 'considering everything.' And when Maria asked, 'Considering what?' they'd just smile or pat her hand. Again, it's a close-knit community. They're not going to tell us all the gossip."

"What about Natalie?"

"Maria says no one knows her-and no one seems to want to know her. In fact, she's probably the 'everything' that all those women find so objectionable." Tess, knowing Natalie's background and youth, saw Nancy's point, "And then there's Lana Wishnia, but she's not saying anything."

"She stonewalled me, too, but I like to think that Baltimore County Police can be a little more persuasive."

"We can-if we have a charge on you." Again Nancy raised a single eyebrow. "But you have to remember, no law has been broken, and Mark Rubin didn't want to pursue custody through the system, so… sayonara. Not our case, not our stat. The major only expended as much energy as he did because he thought the community might get up in arms, bring all this pressure to bear if we didn't make every effort to establish there was no crime. The last thing he wanted was to turn on the news and see some little old ladies marching around the Public Safety Building, picketing the department."

Tess was transformed back into Teresa Esther, defender of the faith. "Are you saying Jews are pushy when they want something?"

"I'm saying people are pushy. But some communities are better organized than others, always have been."

"What are you, anyway? You look WASP, you have a WASP name, but you sure don't have the attitude." Or the bone structure. Nancy Porter's round face was pleasant, but she would never pass as one of Baltimore's moneyed bluebloods.

"Porter is my married name. I was born Potrcurzski. We're pretty burned out, us Poles, just as left behind as your people, Monaghan. We're never going to run this city or state again."

"Baltimore has an Irish mayor now. He even plays in his own Irish band."

"You know, that's one of the few things makes me glad I'm working in the county these days. My sergeant says we live in an era where the politicians want to be rock stars and the rock stars want to be politicians-but only one of those jobs actually takes talent."

Tess laughed. "I have a feeling I'd like your sergeant. Is there anything else I should know about Rubin?"

"His business is sound, and there's no life insurance on his wife or the children. Just on him, which is what you'd expect. Oh, and he's pretty well fixed. Not so much from the business, but from an inheritance. His dad died a few years ago, left him everything, and everything was quite a pile."

"So why did she leave? Why run away from a rich man who adores you and gives you everything you want, if not all the cash you can carry?"

"I'm sorry, but it's not the kind of thing we do at my shop," Nancy said. "We do more concrete stuff. Dead body, who did it, let's lock ' em up. Motives are a luxury I can't afford."

"Still, you must trip over them from time to time. You can't be a cop without learning a lot about human nature."

"Yeah." The single syllable carried a world of memory and meaning. "But when I do find out why someone did something-I usually wish I hadn't."

Chapter Eleven

LIKE AN OLD LADY WHO DIDN'T TRUST BANKS, Baltimore sometimes hid its money in odd places. Robbins amp; Sons, a white stucco building that resembled a bunker, was tucked away on Smith Avenue, a quiet street just northwest of the city limits. Yet its nearest neighbor, a shoe store, sold high heels that even Tess's inexpert eye put at three hundred dollars and beyond, while a dress store in the same strip center was advertising a trunk show for a designer who was surely famous among those who paid attention to such things. These one-named stores-Evelyn's, Soigne-had been built in a different era, when shoppers still expected to brave the elements to go door to door and had to enter stores to get a sense of their wares. The small, narrow displays offered only one or two items for a window-shopper to contemplate.

The stores also provided an interesting contrast to the men strolling along the street here in northwest Baltimore, strictly observant Jews in beards and brimmed hats. It struck Tess for the first time how funny it was that one of the major streets through the heart of this middle-class Jewish neighborhood was named Smith. Did even streets assimilate?

Robbins amp; Sons had no windows at all, just glass double doors and a sign so discreet that it was unlikely anyone ever stumbled on the furrier by accident. Was that intentional? Tess assumed that furriers were besieged these days, quivering inside their stores while picketers circled with cans of red paint. A few years back, her mother had stopped wearing the raccoon coat that Tess's father had given her on their twentieth anniversary, proclaiming herself much too nervous. She then bought a faux fur, but it was such a convincing fake that she was scared to wear it. Instead she wore a good cloth coat. "Like Pat Nixon," joked Tess's Uncle Donald, which angered his sister. Any comparison to any Nixon was considered harsh rhetoric in the Monaghan-Weinstein families.

But there were no protesters here on this bright fall morning, and no evidence that they had been here anytime recently-no splashes of red on the pavement, no leaflets proclaiming "Fur Is Murder." There was nothing here but cars, expensive ones, with women of all ages coming and going as if it were the most normal thing in the world to shop for a fur coat on a day when the temperature would probably reach eighty degrees. Tess pushed through the doors and entered a place as hushed as a temple-and as cold as a meat locker. She wondered if the overly chilled air was for the furs or the menopausal customers.

"May I help you, miss?"

If the salesman thought Tess, in black trousers and white T-shirt, an unlikely customer, nothing in his manner betrayed this fact. He clasped his hands behind his back, his tone polite and helpful, yet not in the over-the-top style of a salesperson who hopes to drive someone away.

Tess decided to test his mien before asking to see Mark Rubin.

"Well, I don't know," she said, giving her voice a Valley Girl whine. Greenspring Valley, that is, or perhaps Worthington, a place where Baltimore 's rich WASPs and Jews lived in an uneasy truce. "I've always thought of fur coats as being something my mother and grandmother wear, but after the last couple of winters, I can't help wondering if it might be a good idea."

"A fur is a wonderful investment," the salesman said, sizing her up. She eyed him back. Tall and slim, with thinning hair, he could have been anywhere from forty to sixty, married or single, straight or gay. "I don't see you as the mink type-"

"Why not?" Did she look poor? Movie stars shopped in T-shirts, after all, and her loafers were Cole Haans. Not as expensive as some designer brands, but not inconsequential.

"I'm not talking about price," he said, remaining smooth and unruffled. Oh, he was a salesman through and through, but a salesman suited to luxury goods, a man who understood that moving minks and Mercedes-Benzes and Bose stereo systems meant long, drawn-out courtships-and much higher commissions. "But if your clothes today are indicative of your preferred look-what I like to call the casual sophisticate-a mink would probably be too formal. Have you thought about beaver?"

Tess figured she could keep a straight face if he could.

"Not really," she said. "I have to admit, I'm so overwhelmed by the process that I don't know where to begin. How can I know if I'm getting my money's worth?"

"Trust your sense of touch." He pulled a jacket from a nearby rack and held its sleeve toward Tess, which she stroked dutifully. "We call the top hairs 'guard hairs.' These should be silky, while the underfur beneath should be even in texture. Now, how does this feel to you?"

"Nice," Tess said. It felt like a dog, although a better-cared-for one than either of hers, whose short coats shed alarmingly.

"Try this." He brought out another jacket, which felt a little softer and seemed to shine with more subtle variations. It was like switching to a top-line colorist after relying on Nice 'n Easy.

"What's the difference?"

"About two thousand dollars." The salesman smiled. He was onto her, he had to be, but the charade seemed to be as amusing to him as it was to Tess. "The second one was made from female pelts, which requires more pieces, and comes from a name designer. All those things add to the price, although not necessarily the quality. Try it on."

"No," Tess demurred, but the salesman was already shrugging it up over her left arm, as if she were a balky toddler who didn't want to put on her snowsuit.

"There," he said. "Look how nice you look-although with your hair I think you'd want to go with ranch instead of wild."

Tess turned reluctantly toward the full-length mirror behind her. She had worried she would look like a furry butter-ball, but he had picked out a sleek coat with the furs placed in a gently curving pattern that flattered the figure. She looked pretty, glamorous even, not that she had ever aspired to glamour.

Yet her image disturbed her, too. It was so matronly, so grown-up. The vision in the mirror was the woman she might have been if she had taken a few different turns in life. More accurately, this would be the Tess who had taken no turns at all, just embarked on that greased chute of marriage and motherhood. For while most of her friends had started out on a gung ho career path, Tess noticed something odd happened when the babies started coming. Female friends who never would have dreamed of leaving their jobs at their husbands' insistence had clamored for the stay-at-home-mommy gig when it became a kind of status symbol.

It was, of course, undeniably good for the kids to have a parent at home. Tess didn't even like to put her dogs in a kennel, so she understood women who were nervous about day care. Still, it was creepy, this voluntary army of Stepford wives who didn't look quite as happy as they insisted they were. Tess had a theory that Botox had soared because so many thirty-something women were frowning. What was the source of their anxiety? They had money, as evidenced by their cars, shoes, and purses, and they clearly spent time on their appearance. Hair, nails, skin-all just so. They were the women she had glimpsed at Adrian's, the ladies who lunch, only these days it was the ladies who didn't lunch, who dutifully followed the diet of the moment and trudged to the gym, then came home to drive the SUV around in the going-nowhere circles necessitated by car pools and soccer matches and gymnastic classes.

A sudden wheeze gripped Tess, and she felt a horrible, messy sneeze coming on, which she decided to stifle rather than risk spraying across a twelve-thousand-dollar coat.

"Fox might be good for you, too," the salesman said thoughtfully. "Or shearling."

"What about the… issues?"

"What issues?" he asked sharply. One thing to be a shopping dilettante, Tess supposed, another to be a PETA activist scoping the place out.

"Well, you know, the humane issues."

"Oh." His expression couldn't have been blander. "I suppose that is a consideration for some people. Certainly I would never recommend a fur to someone who couldn't reconcile her personal beliefs with the industry's practices, any more than I would serve a vegetarian friend a steak. Here at Robbins amp; Sons, we don't proselytize for fur. But what I've found is that most people realize that nature is hierarchical, and while we try to coexist peacefully with other living things, we have created a world where people come first. At least I hope we have. We eat animals-you do eat them, right? I couldn't help noticing you were wearing leather shoes."

"Yes, I eat meat and wear leather. I kill cockroaches, too, but I always give them a shout-out before I go into the kitchen at night, so they have a sporting chance to flee."

"Hmmm. So, really, for you, the question isn't whether this should be done but how others might react to you?" He let his voice scale up, but Tess sensed he wasn't really asking a question. "You care what people think."

He was good, in some ways better than the psychiatrist that the state of Maryland had forced Tess to see up until recently. "I guess I do."

"Consider this. What do we tell older women about avoiding street crime? We tell them to walk with confidence, heads held high, purses clutched firmly under their arms. Well, I tell my customers the same thing, especially women such as yourself, who buy their own furs. Walk with your head high. You have purchased a fine garment, a timeless garment, an investment that enhances your beauty. You walk like that, you don't have to worry about other people."

Tess looked in the mirror again. She did look pretty. And, really, she couldn't argue against the fur business on principle. The image still bothered her, but it wasn't the source of the coat's materials, more its message, an announcement of consumption and self-indulgence. Tess could happily blow hundreds of dollars buying a piece of outsider art that her mother assumed she trash-picked, or thousands on a new computer just to go a few seconds faster on the Internet. But she could not make peace with any adornment, any object, that invited others to envy her relative comfort. It was an invitation to the evil eye, and the Weinstein side of her never wanted to provoke the evil eye. Crow had never gotten that, but then Crow had the cheerful optimism that came from being born into money and comfort.

A soft chime sounded, indicating that the front door had opened, and Mark Rubin entered the store. He did not seem impressed by the sight of Tess in mink.

"You find Mrs. Gordon's lynx?" the salesman asked.

"Yes, Paul, I've handled the 'emergency' as I've handled it every year for the past decade when Mrs. Gordon has scheduled one of these trips and forgotten to call ahead to get her coats out of storage. This year it's a Scandinavian cruise."

"She's such a-" Conscientious Paul remembered he was standing next to a potential customer. "She's such a sweet lady, but a little forgetful."

"Well, that's why we have our own storage vault. I can always get a coat for a valued customer, as long as it's not on the Sabbath."

"You have your own storage facility?" Tess was trying to cover up the awkwardness she felt, as if she had been caught at something.

Mark nodded curtly. "The other locals use a warehouse in northern Virginia. I'll take over from here, Paul. Miss Monaghan came to see me."

"Certainly, Mr. Rubin." The salesman disappeared with the practiced discretion of a man who knows how to make himself invisible.

"He's good at his job," Tess said as soon as Paul was out of earshot.

"He's excellent. So why were you wasting his time? Not to mention bringing my personal business into my workplace. I hope you don't squander your own time as carelessly as you used my salesman's. After all, I'm paying for it."

"I was curious about your business," she said, taking off the coat and returning it to the rack. Rubin reached out and gave it a few smoothing strokes, as if Tess had defiled the mink in some way. "Right now I'm curious about everything you do. Somewhere in your life, there's got to be a clue, a hint, as to where your wife might have gone, and why. For example, is there anyone else in your life who disappeared about the same time?"

"What do you mean?"

"An employee, for example. Someone from your street. The guy who delivers your newspaper. Natalie had to have some help. She only had a few thousand dollars, right? At least that's what I just learned from the Baltimore County cops. You didn't trust your wife with cash, so she had to figure out a way to sneak it. But she was scared enough to pay most of it back, with a check written by a manicurist who happens to be her oldest friend. But for some reason you didn't think to tell me about your household accounting or to give me Lana Wishnia's name as a lead. I had to pay Natalie's mother a hundred dollars just to find out she existed." Mark Rubin looked around the store. "Let's go back to my office. I'd prefer not to have this conversation out here, on the floor, where customers come and go."

His office was utilitarian, a windowless room with a messy desk stacked with catalogs. The only personal touch was a bright red shelf filled with photographs of his children and his wife. This long mantel was mounted to the wall behind Rubin's desk, almost like a credenza, so Tess ended up facing all those photos when she sat opposite him. The photos made her feel guilty, as if the children's faces were pleading with her to bring them back to a place where they had smiled and laughed as they did in these photos. Their mother, however, was somber-lips together, eyes downcast. But there was a kind of calculation in the look, too, a sense that Natalie Rubin was striking a pose, her eyes sliding away from the camera's lens lest it glimpse her secrets.

"I never knew this little shopping center existed," Tess said, making conversation. "Have you always been here?"

"My father opened the store in this location about thirty-five years ago. Like most merchants, he started off downtown, but he was quick to figure out that the customers were moving farther and farther away and that the stores needed to follow them. He was already making plans to relocate when the riots came. But we always lived out here in Pikesville. We had to."

"Why? It's not like those old real-estate covenants barring Jews were still in effect in the other neighborhoods."

"I have to live within walking distance of my shul," he said, his voice patient, yet a little patronizing. It was becoming a familiar tone to Tess. Had he spoken to his wife with these same inflections? That would explain a lot.

"Right So where's the other son?"

"What do you mean? Have you learned something about Isaac and Efraim?"

"No, no-the store is called Robbins amp; Sons. I figured out that Robbins is simply Rubin, anglicized. But you're the only son here. Did you have a brother?"

"Oh." He shrugged. "The name goes back to my father. The other furriers in town-Mano Swartz, Miller Brothers-had such impressive-sounding names. And he had a partner in the beginning, when he was downtown, but they went their separate ways. So Robbins amp; Sons, two lies for the price of one. Only one son, and the name is Rubin. But if my boys… if my boys… well, perhaps we'll make the name true yet."

Tess completed his thought in her head: If his boys were found, if they were okay. Apparently, Mark Rubin had his own reservations about tempting the evil eye.

"Did you feel obligated to go into the family business?"

"Not at all. I considered it a privilege. My father made it clear, early on, that our partnership was to be a two-way street-I could say no, but he could, too. If I wanted to do something else, there would be no hard feelings. And if he decided I didn't have the brains to run it, then no hard feelings on my part either. Some people found my father rather… rigid. Strict, at least in business."

"What do you mean, 'at least in business'?"

"He wasn't strict about religion at all. My father considered himself Orthodox, but he did things I would never do. Dance with a woman who was not his wife, for example. Eat in nonkosher restaurants. Such looseness was more common before the Conservative movement gathered strength. I decided I wanted to follow a more traditional Orthodox lifestyle. It's all relative. There are Hasidim who consider me unspeakably liberal."

"Was there a reason you embraced a stricter version of the religion than the one practiced in your family?" The question was asked out of nothing more than sheer curiosity. One of the perks of being a private detective was that one was allowed to pursue topics considered outrageously rude in everyday life. Tess could ask people about their income, their sex lives, and even about religion, the most forbidden topic of all in some ways.

"Reasons, I'd say. But they all fall under the general heading of growing up, moving on. My father died ten years ago. Heart attack. Died, in fact, carrying an armload of furs into the vault. The last thing he said to me was, 'Mark-grab the coats.' He didn't want them to fall. He was dead when he hit the ground."

"This was just before you married, right?"

The shrug again. Rubin was an eloquent shrugger. "My father was fifty-five when I was born, yet he outlived my mother, who was twenty years younger and died before my fifth birthday. He also outlived my stepmother, who died when I was a teenager. I was in no hurry to marry, and my father seemed to enjoy my companionship. Besides, I was waiting for a love match, a true one."

"I guess a good-looking Orthodox furrier doesn't want for prospective wives."

He stroked his beard, amused. "How nice to know you think I'm good-looking."

Tess pretended to be flustered, but the compliment had been calculated. She had wanted to soften him up before she began asking the ruder questions. "So… about Lana Wishnia."

"I didn't know her." Said quickly, as if that would make the subject go away. "And the police told me she was Natalie's manicurist. You say they were friends, but this is the first I've heard of that."

"I'm more curious about the check Lana wrote to Natalie-and your little bookkeeping system, which made it necessary. Why didn't Natalie have money of her own?"

"She had credit cards, an ATM card, accounts at all the stores where she shopped. She never wanted for anything."

"C'mon, it was pretty medieval, and not even in keeping with your own beliefs. Jewish women have always been given a lot of control over their homes, allowed to have their own money. Was it a bone of contention in the marriage? Did Natalie want things set up differently? Maybe this whole disappearing act is a walkout intended to get you to change some things."

"No," he said, an edge to his voice. "No, you have the wrong idea."

"Really? Then would you point me in the direction of the right idea? Again, I have to ask you if Natalie had an addiction of some sort. Because that's the usual reason not to entrust a family member with cash."

"I don't want… You shouldn't ask such questions. This is the mother of my children, my wife. You're being disrespectful."

The phone rang just then, and Rubin flicked on the speakerphone. A man's voice, high and reedy through the distortion of the voice box, started out tentatively: "This is Jack Reid, up in Montreal, and there's a small problem with the knitwear you ordered for this fall."

"There are no small problems, Jack." Mark Rubin's voice took on a cold, ruthless quality that Tess had not heard before. I wouldn't want to go up against him in a business deal, she thought Then she realized she already had, and he had acquiesced readily at the price she named. She must have underbid the job.

The voice on the speaker continued, clearly nervous. "The per-unit cost quoted you… my assistant… well, he's new, and he didn't figure in some ancillary costs. There are some complicated tariffs and shipping fees, at least in order to make the October date we agreed to. You see, we get the pieces from New York, but still have to assemble them here, so you're talking a really fast turnaround."

"That's your problem."

"But I'm going to lose money if you hold me to that price."

"No you're not. You may not make as much as you counted on making this fall, but you won't lose money, not in the long run. The way you'll lose money is by trying to renegotiate the price or delay delivery. Then you'll lose a lot of money, because I'll never buy from you again, and I'll persuade other merchants in my area to blackball you, too, tell them how unreliable you are. You'll never make another sale in the Mid-Atlantic region."

"But, Mark-"

"No, Jack. Do it for the agreed-on price, delivery on the contracted date, or we're through. You're through."

"If you could just split the difference in the shipping?"

"I can, but I won't. Fob it off on one of your stupider clients, who doesn't read every line on his bill. But don't try to play me for a fool."

"Mark, if you could just see your way clear…"

"Jack, hang up now, or I'm going to insist you deliver a week earlier. At your expense."

"Pleasure doing business with you," the disembodied Jack said, allowing himself a small measure of sarcasm in his defeat.

"The pleasure," Rubin said, "is all mine." He punched a button, disconnecting the line.

Tess sat in stunned silence, half admiring, half appalled.

"In business," Rubin said, "you have to remember who works for whom. He needs me more than I need him. So I win."

"Well, by that logic I work for you, but you need me and you need to heed my advice. You can't keep everything decorous, Mr. Rubin." Funny, she was closer to him in age than his own wife was, but she just couldn't call him by his first name, and he never invited her to. "You can't mark areas of your life 'keep out,' especially if they might hold the key to where your wife and children went."

"I want to find my wife, but I don't want to violate her, or expose her."

"Expose her to what?"

"Nothing," he said, backpedaling. "It's just that I've come to you with a problem of what I would call location. I want to know where my wife is. Why she left isn't so important to me. We'll deal with that when she comes home, between us."

"But I may not be able to find her unless I know the why. So if there's anything you're not telling me…"

The phone rang again, and Rubin punched the speaker-phone with great enthusiasm, as if happy for the interruption.

"That better not be you, Jack," he warned the phone. But the voice that came back was mechanical and unhearing.

"This is a collect call from 1-800-CALL-ATT. If you wish to accept this call, please press '1' on your TouchTone phone. The message is from-"

A pause, then another voice, a human one, small but determined: "Isaac."

Rubin almost broke the phone's plastic surface in his effort to punch the 1, but his voice was controlled when he spoke. "Isaac? Isaac? Are you there?"

A rush of words, boyish and high, filled the room, for Rubin had left the phone in speaker mode. "Daddy, this is Isaac. I'm in a McDonald's, but I'm not sure where. I tried to call you earlier, when we first got here, but I got your voice mail and I used up the money that I told Mama I wanted for a salad. Now everyone is playing in the ball room, and they think I'm going to the bathroom. Don't worry, I didn't eat anything, although I guess a salad would be okay. I'm not supposed to call you, but I don't care, because I want to come home and be with you, in our house, and go to school and-Daddy! DADDEE!"

And the call ended on that long-drawn-out syllable, a shriek that faded away, followed by a vague scuffling noise.

"Isaac? Isaac? Isaac, are you there?" But there was no reply, just a click. The line had definitely gone dead.

Rubin grabbed at his hair, as if he might tear it out, then pushed the phone off the desk as if it were responsible for whatever was happening on the other end of the line. He then began throwing every sheet of paper from his desk, showering Tess, who was on her hands and knees, trying to retrieve the phone even as paper rained down on her.

"I'm calling AT amp;T back," she said, trying to stay calm in the face of Rubin's amazing rage and grief. "They should be able to tell us the number he called from."

"He said he tried to call earlier and I wasn't here. Why wasn't I here? Because of that behayma, Mrs. Gordon, and her stupid lynx. She should fall off the Norwegian Princess and drown for what she's cost me."

The phone had caller ID, and the number was on the LED display. Tess found a phone book beneath a pile of glossy catalogs showing young women in furs of not-in-nature colors-lilac, moss green, peacock blue. "Area code 812 is southwestern Indiana."

"We should go, we should call the police, we should-"

"You call the police," Tess said, "while I dial this number back."

But it rang busy. It rang busy every time they tried it for the next hour.

Chapter Twelve

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

Zeke seized Isaac by his collar and arm, yanking him so hard that the pay phone, loosed from Isaac's grasp, bounced on its metallic tail like an enraged cobra, hitting the white-tiled wall and caroming off, catching Isaac hard enough across the face to raise a welt. Good. It was almost as good a release as hitting the goddamn kid himself. Which he would never do, and not just because Natalie wouldn't stand for it. Zeke had known the end of a belt as a boy and had sworn to himself never to inflict such pain on a child. It hadn't been the beatings so much. It was the ritual of the beatings-the weary trudge to the closet for the correct belt, the chair in the kitchen, the way the belt was looped just so over the right hand. And, more than anything else, it was the mournful resignation, the insistence that he had brought the punishment on himself.

"I said, 'What are you doing?' " Zeke depressed the hangup switch but let the receiver swing free. He then turned the boy around, pressed him against the wall-okay, pushed him against it-and dug his fingers into his neck and shoulders just hard enough to let Isaac know that he meant business. But his voice was low. He had learned this, too, in childhood. As long as you kept your voice low, you could get away with a lot. It was tones, the shrill and the sharp, that made people look up. You could practically kill a person and not draw a crowd, as long as you never raised your voice.

Isaac kept his eyes on the floor. "I was making a phone call."

"To who? To who?" Zeke might have started shaking him then, but a woman came out of the restroom and gave them a curious look. He threw an arm around Isaac's neck, trying to make their interaction look like good-natured roughhousing.

"To whom," the boy corrected, and Zeke really wanted to slap him then. What nine-year-old knew the difference between "who" and "whom," much less cared? The stupid kid should be grateful for his rescue from that tight-ass upbringing, not spending every moment scheming about how to return.

"You didn't call 911, did you, Isaac?" Even Zeke lost the new names when his emotions ran high. "We're all going to be in some deep shit, you try that. You know what they're going to do? They're going to take you away from your mom. But they won't give you back to your dad-oh, no. They'll split you and Efraim and Penina up, put you in foster homes. Is that what you want?"

Isaac's lip quivered, but he didn't break easy, this kid. Spoiled as he was, he was a tough number.

"You called your dad, didn't you? I heard you say 'Daddy,' don't deny it. Look, I can pick up the phone right now, call the operator, and ask her where the last call went from this phone, so you might as well tell me."

"'1-800-CALL-ATT,'" Isaac said in a mockingbird's singsong voice. " 'Free for you and cheap for them.' "

"Ike, you want to spend more time in the trunk? Because that can be arranged. You can ride back there all the time, take your meals there, spend the nights there if that's what you want."

Isaac stared back, yielding no ground. God, he was tough. Those had to be his grandfather's genes, not his father's. But the boy couldn't hold it together very long, and he finally whispered, "I called my dad, at the store. I miss him."

"Did you get him?"

"I'm not sure. He never… The machine didn't pick up, but I'm not sure he was there."

Softened by his victory, Zeke bent down next to Isaac, examining the red mark the phone had left. Not good, a kid with a bruised eye. People noticed things like that. They had to avoid attracting any attention, at least for the next few weeks. That's why they had been on the move since Natalie had refused to take the kids home. Her stupid impulse had forced Zeke to risk much more than he wanted, but what could he do? He couldn't convince her to leave without telling her everything, and Natalie couldn't be trusted with what Zeke thought of as the global overview. Her ignorance of certain details was key to the success of his plan.

"We'll want to put something on that. I'd ask for a raw steak, but I'm pretty sure they don't have real steak here. Hey, maybe I could ask for a McRib, but the barbecue sauce would stick to your face."

The boy didn't smile. "All the food here is crummy. I wouldn't want to eat it even if it were kosher."

"It's good food-you don't know what you're missing. Other kids love it, would eat it every day if they could."

Isaac just shook his head, his lips pressed together as if someone might try to sneak in an outlaw french fry. Zeke was actually worried about how little the kid ate, holding out as much as possible. Today he had agreed to drink a strawberry milk shake, on the grounds that it wasn't made from real milk, then asked for the money for a salad. He loaded up on salad bars when they went to places like Ruby Tuesday, sometimes asking the waitress for a Styrofoam to-go box and plastic utensils. He was rigid, a little chip off the old-before-his-time block. But there was something defiant in his behavior, too, a thumb-in-the-eye slyness that drove Zeke mad.

"I know about keeping kosher, but it's bullshit, my man, just old superstitions that don't make any sense. You think God cares what kind of plates you eat from or whether you have a lobster now and men? Why would God make something as delicious as lobster if he didn't mean for man to eat it? Think about it."

"It didn't look good, when we went to that Red Lobster place. The twins left it on their plates. They said it tasted like butter-flavored rubber."

Zeke decided to try a different tack. "You miss your dad, don't you, partner?"

The boy nodded miserably.

"Look, I know what it's like to miss someone, buddy, but you have to understand. This is for the best. Your dad was good to you, but he wasn't good to your mom. Your mom was very, very unhappy, living like she did. And your dad knew it, but he didn't want to do anything about it. So she had to leave."

"She could have left me with Dad. I wasn't unhappy."

"Is that what you wanted, a life without your mother?"

The question was cruel, almost worse than a smack, asking a child to choose between two parents. Zeke could see that Isaac was floored by the impossibility. Like every kid since time began, he wanted his mother and his father. Yeah, well, four out of five dentists pick Trident, and one out of two marriages folds. Get used to it, kid. One parent is better than nothing. Zeke had two, then he had one, then none. It was all survivable.

"Was my mom really unhappy?" the boy asked. "I never saw her cry."

"She didn't want you to know, but yeah, she was really unhappy."

"But my dad was happy, and I was happy, and the twins were happy."

"I suppose so. You thought you were, which is as good as. But now that you know how unhappy your mom was, maybe it was all an illusion."

Isaac shook his head, defiant now. "No, I was definitely happy. So you're saying that for my mom to be happy, it's okay to make us all unhappy-me and my dad and the twins."

"The twins are like puppies, my man. They're fine as long as they're warm and their bellies are full."

"Still," Isaac said, "two against one, me and my dad."

"What?"

"Majority rule. If we were happy, she should have tried to be happy."

Oh, man, the apple really don't fall far from the tree. Another little selfish shit, courtesy of Orthodox Judaism, arguing every point as if it were straight from the Talmud. What about my happiness? Zeke wanted to ask this smug brat, but he knew that Isaac didn't consider Zeke a factor. As someone outside the Rubin golden circle, he didn't matter at all.

"Look, partner, there's some stuff kids just can't understand. If we go back to Baltimore, they're not going to let you live with your dad."

"Why?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"I could if you pick the right words. My father tries to explain everything to me, no matter how complicated."

"I'm not your father," Zeke said, straightening up. "Thank fuckin' God."

He assumed that Isaac would have a smart-ass retort, but Natalie appeared in the corridor just then, the twins in tow, her lovely face flushed and on the verge of tears.

"Penina-I mean, Daisy-made…" She gestured helplessly at the girl, red-faced and damp, either at the end of a crying jag or about to begin one.

"Made what?" Zeke asked, although Isaac was nodding as if he understood.

"Made. In her pants, in the ball room, and they're all out there screaming at me, saying the sign says no children who aren't toilet trained. Only she is, she was, for over three years now-never even wet the bed in all this time. I don't know what's gotten into her."

The girl babbled something, and the boy twin babbled back, comforting her, or so Zeke assumed. He couldn't understand a word these two said, even when it was allegedly in English. Natalie said they used to talk like normal kids, but you couldn't prove it by Zeke.

"Take her in the ladies' room and clean her up the best you can," Zeke said. "I'll take the boys out to the car and wait for you there. And if we have to, we'll start strapping diapers on the two of them. If I'm all but living in a car, I don't want it to smell like crap."

He left the receiver dangling on its silver cord, catching Isaac's longing looks toward it. Zeke was going to have to watch this one like a hawk. Watch him or put him in the trunk more often. He had no choice.

You'll be sorry, he thought, then wondered who the words were for, Isaac or some long-vanquished foe. Was the boy his enemy or simply a reminder of others who had wronged him? Oh, things would be so much simpler if Natalie hadn't shown up with the children, if she'd never had them in the first place. There weren't supposed to be any children. But there were, and Zeke prided himself on his ability to improvise. The key to a truly genius plan was its flexibility, the planner's ability to modify, to roll with the punches.

Natalie had always been good at keeping secrets. That was a big part of her attraction. It occurred to Zeke for the first time that perhaps she had grown too good at staying mum, that there could be other surprises in store for him as well. He might have to think this all through again, change his plan one more time. He had to figure out just what he was going to do about the kids.

Chapter Thirteen

Tess sat in Rubin's office chair for the next hour, hitting the redial button with her index finger until she began to feel a twinge from wrist to elbow. Finally the unsympathetic buzz of the busy signal gave way to a ring, which turned into a puzzled "Hello?" on the twelfth ring.

"Could you please tell me where I'm calling? I know it's a McDonald's in Indiana, in the 812 area code." Caller ID and Isaac had combined to give her that much information. "But I need the town name and the location of this phone."

"You're calling McDonald's but you don't know why or where it is?" The voice was pleasant if foggy, a young man blissed out on Happy Meals or some other substance that had led to the sudden need for a cheeseburger.

"Long story," Tess said. "Boring one, too. But I sure would like to know where you are."

"Well, according to conventional cartography, I am at the forty-second latitude and seventy-fifth longitude, aka French Lick, Indiana, you'll pardon the expression."

"Is that really the latitude and longitude for French Lick?" Tess asked, curious in spite of herself.

"No, I just made it up, but it sounds plausible, doesn't it? Where are you calling from?"

"Baltimore."

"Oh, I don't think so," the young man said, hanging up. Tess felt like one of the errant knights in a Monty Python film, denied permission to cross a bridge because she'd waffled on her favorite color. She had already struck out with the state police once they heard that Mark's son had confirmed he was with his mother and there was no custody order for the father to enforce. No laws broken there, the police said, compassionate but firm. If only Isaac had spoken of kidnapping or said he feared for his life.

Tess called directory assistance and asked to be connected to the only McDonald's in French Lick, but the manager refused to answer any of her questions, saying she had just gotten on and couldn't possibly know who had passed through the restaurant even an hour ago.

"Is there someone else-" Tess began.

"Have you seen the sign? Over a billion served? Well, about half of 'em were here today already, and I don't have time for this. You should see my restrooms."

The manager ended the call by slamming down the phone with a bang so hard and an epithet so coarse that it shattered any stereotype Tess harbored about kindly, salt-of-the-earth midwesterners.

"French Lick, Indiana," Tess said to Mark, who had been pacing his office like a caged animal, literally pulling at his hair. "That mean anything to you? Do you or Natalie know people there, or anywhere nearby?"

He had the desperate look of a kid in a spelling bee asked to tackle a word he had never heard of, sounding it out as if stalling for time. "French Lick, French Lick, French Lick, French Lick."

"Just go," said Paul the salesman. Apprised of the afternoon's events, he had been keeping vigil with his boss, scurrying back into the store whenever the chime announced arriving customers. "Get in your car and go, boss. I can take care of things here."

"Maybe I should. How far could it be. Ten hours? Twelve hours? If I started driving right now…"

"You wouldn't be doing anyone any good," Tess said. Her bluntness seemed to offend the two men, but she didn't have the patience for the rhetorical curlicues-the "I think"s and "perhaps"es that women were supposed to use when giving orders. "Look, I know you want to do something. But I can get someone there faster, and learn a lot more, without ever leaving this chair."

"How can that be?" Rubin asked.

Tess patted the side of the IBM ThinkPad lying open on his desk. "Good old-fashioned networking. Just tell me how to connect to your ISP, and I can guarantee results in less than two hours."

She had them in one. Gretchen used the instant message function to link all the online SnoopSisters via a spontaneous chat, even as she was assuring Tess that (a) she could take the gig and (b) yes, Chicago was closer to French Lick than anyone else in the network and (c) Tess was a total idiot when it came to geography outside Maryland. Letha in St. Louis jumped in and said French Lick was, in fact, closer to her, but her son had a soccer game Saturday afternoon, so let Gretchen take it. Gretchen said the whole point would be moot in a few days, when the newest SnoopSister, a documents whiz from Columbus, Ohio, signed on. She also said she rather liked McDonald's and felt that the company had taken a bad rap in the infamous coffee lawsuit. Perhaps that was the real reason the manager had been so rude to Tess.

This prompted Jessie Ray in Texas to point out that the McDonald's lawsuit was not at all frivolous but one involving real injury to an elderly woman, possibly second-degree burns, and that the rumored settlement was not some pie-in-the-sky amount but a sum correlated to McDonald's coffee profits. Plus, the restaurant had been warned about overheating its coffee, so punitive damages were not without warrant. Susan in Omaha countered that people who drank McDonald's coffee had already suffered enough.

STAY ON TOPIC, PLEASE, Tess typed. And get on the road, Gretchen.

Rubin watched all this furious typing with skepticism, as if activity that didn't produce a tangible product couldn't possibly accomplish anything.

"Trust me, this will work better in the long run," Tess assured him after signing off. "Gretchen will be there tonight, with photographs of your children and wife to show people she interviews. She'll go back to the restaurant tomorrow, too, visiting about the same time of day as the calls were made. That way she has a shot of getting the right manager, the right shift workers, who might be more responsive to a visitor than they were to my phone call. If your family is still in town, she'll find them."

"And if they're not?" Rubin bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, but this couldn't stem the tears coursing down his face. He didn't seem the least bit embarrassed about crying in front of Tess. She, on the other hand, was mortified.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Gretchen is really dogged. Give her a chance. She's swapping the work out against future work from me, so it doesn't cost you any extra."

"I still think I should go myself."

"Earlier today you said you hoped I was judicious with my time. I am. That's why I know this is the smart way to go. Meanwhile, at the risk of repeating myself, can you think of any reason your wife would be in French Lick, Indiana, or passing through there? Family, friends, any kind of connection?"

"No. What little family she has is… here. I mean, I suppose there are relatives back in Russia, but in this country it's always been just Natalie and her parents."

"I've met her mother. Where's her father?"

"I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure it's not Indiana."

"What's his name?" Tess tore a piece of paper from a memo pad on the desk: ROBBINS amp; SONS-SINCE 1946.

"Why do you want his name? He moved away long ago. He and Natalie don't even talk."

"Databases. I'll run it through all sorts of databases, and he could pop out. Maybe in French Lick. You never know."

"It's such a common name, Peters, I don't think you'd be able to do much with it."

"Let me worry about that."

"Come to think of it, I'm not sure the surname was ever adopted legally. I think her father might be using his Russian name."

"I can narrow the results down with age and any other information you have for him, like past addresses. I assume he lived in the row house on Labyrinth at some point."

"I think Vera got that place after they separated."

"Could I just have a full name? And an approximate age?"

"Boris Pasternak."

"Author of Doctor Zhivago?"

"I'm sorry. I meant Petrovich, Boris Petrovich. And I guess he's about fifty."

"So your father-in-law is closer to you in age than your wife is?"

"Not by so much. I'm twelve years older than Natalie, he's eight years older than I am."

Tess willed herself to have no reaction. "How did you meet anyway?"

"Who?"

"You and Natalie."

"Oh. Well, I had seen her around-Baltimore is small that way, northwest Baltimore smaller still." This was true, Tess knew. Baltimore wasn't so much a metro area of 1 million-plus as it was a dozen small towns that overlapped in various places. "The first time we spoke was in the old Carvel's on Reisterstown Road. She worked behind the counter. I stopped in for a cone, and we got to talking."

"I thought you said she never worked."

"Did I? I mean that she never had a career. She had summer jobs, like any other teenager. Carvel's, babysitting." He shook his head, as if burdened by his memories. "Isaac loved that story. He'd ask us to tell it again and again. I thought that was odd, because boys don't usually care for that kind of detail. But he was very aware of the fact that he would not exist if it weren't for the chance encounter of his parents. It was almost like a suspense story for him. What if we hadn't met? What if we hadn't spoken?"

"Why do you think," Tess said, "that she took them with her? The children, I mean?"

"She's their mother. She loves them."

It was what he had said before, and while it was perfectly reasonable, Tess was not yet convinced it was a complete answer. "Is that the only reason?" He looked bewildered. "Is she trying to get at you? Did she take the children because she knew it would hurt you?"

"Why would she want to hurt me?"

"I don't know." Tess wished she could plug him into the virtual world of the SnoopSisters, whose members would have been happy to enlighten Rubin about the many reasons women want to hurt, or at the very least startle, the men with whom they shared their lives. So many women in relationships had bouts of feeling they had been more colonized than courted, subsumed by a larger, more powerful entity. And when they rebelled, it was nothing short of the Boston Tea Party. Everything-everybody-went overboard.

"You should go home," she said. "Nothing's going to happen, not here, not tonight. I'm going to go toodle around on my laptop, see if I can find a match for Boris Petrovich in the Indiana phone book."

"You won't." Even in his frenzied grief, Mark Rubin retained his irritating, know-it-all quality.

"Well, we'll find out by this time tomorrow if your family is still in French Lick, and maybe that's all we need. I'll call you-" She caught herself. "I'll call you as soon as the Sabbath ends."

"You could call earlier. I think I would be allowed to answer the phone under such circumstances."

"Do you have caller ID?"

"No."

"Then how will you know it's me who's calling? Wait until sundown. Gretchen probably won't get to me much sooner than that anyway."

"And what if my family has left French Lick?"

"Then we're where we were this morning, no different."

"No, it will be worse, because I've had this moment of hope. If I had been here the first time he called…"

"We have a lead. If Gretchen finds out anything significant, she'll stay throughout the weekend, keep digging. That will cost you, though. Her extra expenses are on top of my per diem."

"I told you, money's not an issue."

"Yeah, people always say that-and yet it always is somehow."

Her laptop open on the dining-room table, Tess checked the clock in the upper-right-hand corner-7:15. The dogs looked at her with mournful patience. She could take them for a quick one around the block, then return to work, or finish up and then give them the nice long saunter they had earned after being cooped up all day. It was a beautiful night, dry and cool since the sun had gone down. And it was a clear night, so the stars would be visible overhead.

She started to close her laptop. The search for Petrovich could wait a few hours, although Rubin would probably writhe in anxiety if he knew she was postponing any task, even for a few minutes.

Except… for all his impatience about everything else, Rubin had been so certain she wouldn't find Boris Petrovich/Peters that he didn't care if she tracked him down at all. He had, in fact, seemed determined to keep her from following that one lead, using that fake name. If she hadn't been an English major, Boris Pasternak might have slid right by her.

She sat back down, ignoring the dogs' profound disappointment, and began dropping the two variations of the name into every database she had. Rubin was right about one thing: Petrovich was a common surname. There were a surprising number of Boris Peterses on the planet, too. But by working backward from the property records for Labyrinth Road-for Boris had been on the deed before the divorce, according to the city tax rolls-she was able to find an MVA record, which led to his date of birth.

Bit by bit the information accrued-name, age, last residence, which appeared to be not far from Labyrinth Road, although that house had been sold as well, about thirteen years earlier, and there was no new address and no phone. But he wasn't on the Social Security database, so he was either still alive or not in their system at all. Dead end-until Tess thought of one last search, a place where a man might live without generating much of a paper trail. It wasn't a record that civilians could access easily, but Tess had a back door, thanks to the systems manager at the Beacon-Light.

Tess had paid dearly for this dummy account that allowed her to skim the wide array of online information available to Beacon-Light reporters. The trick was to be judicious with her access, for each search cost money, and profligate users were sometimes flagged in random audits. Tess typed in her user name-Jimmy Cain-and the password, "Indemnity." Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light, it was entirely plausible that this familiar version of the novelist's name would escape notice even in the event of a wide-scale audit that kicked out everyone. But he had been a Baltimore journalist before he headed out to Hollywood. Tess liked to imagine an assistant city editor staring worriedly at a staff roster and asking his boss, "Hey, who's this Jimmy Cain kid? I don't remember seeing his byline lately." Yes, here was Boris Petrovich at last, with an all-too-permanent address-the Maryland Correctional Institute in Jessup, where he was serving a twenty-year sentence for second-degree murder.