No Good Deeds

SUNDAY
1

“Tess, do you know who the Baltimore Four were?”

It took Tess Monaghan a moment to surface from her own thoughts, but she eventually came up for air, leaving behind the various newspaper articles and computer printouts strewn across her dining room table-and rug and hallway and breakfront-in seemingly random stacks that were actually quite methodical. She had tried to confine this project to her office, but with the presentation now just twenty-four hours away, such compartmentalization had to be sacrificed. The future of Keyes Investigations Inc., the lofty-sounding name that encompassed exactly one employee-three if you included the dogs, who accompanied her to the office every day-was riding on this assignment.

“I should hope so,” she told her boyfriend, Crow, who had found a corner of the dining room table large enough to hold a bowl of cereal and the New York Times acrostic, which he was working between bites with his usual infuriating nonchalance. “Any native Baltimorean who doesn’t should have his or her birth certificate revoked.”

“Well, it’s not like they were super famous, not as famous as the guys who came after. And it was before you were born.”

“My father didn’t neglect my education in key areas, I’m happy to say.”

“Your dad didn’t know either. I asked him the other day at work, and he said it sounded familiar, but it didn’t make much of an impression on him.”

“Didn’t make much of an impression?” Tess, who had been on her hands and knees, the better to crawl through her paper labyrinth, rocked back on her heels. “It was only one of the transforming events of his life.”

“Wasn’t he already married when the Vietnam draft started?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Baltimore Four-Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, and Dobson, the four Oriole pitchers who had at least twenty wins in the regular season in 1971.”

Crow laughed in his easy way, a laugh that excused her ignorance-and his. “I’m talking about four antiwar activists who poured blood on records at the U.S. Customs House in 1967, sort of a runup to the Catonsville Nine. Philip Berrigan-Berrigan, Lewis, Mengel, and Eberhardt. I heard about them when I was making my rounds at the soup kitchens last week.”

Tess was staring at a photograph of a dark-eyed, dark-haired man. “You and that do-gooder crowd. Just remember, no good deed-”

“Goes unpunished. Jesus, Tess, you’d probably have mocked Gandhi if you met him.”

“Not to his face.”

“Anyway, I think they were pretty cool. Berrigan and that group. Can you imagine someone pouring blood on records today?”

“Yes. And I can imagine that person being detained at Guantánamo without legal counsel, so don’t get any ideas.”

Tess returned to sorting her papers, only to find her shoulder-length hair falling in her face. It was an impossible length-not quite long enough for the single braid she was trying to coax back into being after an untimely haircut, but too long to be allowed to swing free. She fashioned stubby pigtails on either side of her head, securing them with rubber bands, and went back to work.

“Hey, you look like Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters,” Crow said approvingly. “Circa 1999. You going to wear your hair like that tomorrow?”

“It’s a thought.” An amusing one, actually: Tess as her authentic self, in her favorite sweats, henley shirt, and ad hoc hairstyle, standing in front of the buttoned-down types that had infiltrated the local newspaper. But at the prices the Beacon-Light editors were paying, they expected and deserved the bogus Tess-hair slicked behind her ears into some semblance of order, a suit, real shoes with heels, which Tess actually liked, as they made her almost six feet tall. “I can’t believe they want a PowerPoint for this thing. I’d rather spend the afternoon at Kinko’s, photocopying twenty-five sets of every package, instead of fighting with my scanner to load all these images.”

“Why is a newspaper hiring a private detective for consulting work anyway? Shouldn’t their own reporters know how to do this stuff?”

“They’ve had an exodus of senior staff, which they’ve replaced with a lot of inexperienced kids. Feeney thought it was his lucky day when he got promoted to city editor, but herding these rookies is more likely to put him in an early grave.”

“So what are you supposed to do?”

“They’ve asked me to take three recent cases in the news and use them as sort of intellectual object lessons, walk them through all the possible scenarios in an investigation.”

“WWTMD-What Would Tess Monaghan Do?”

Tess laughed. “Sort of. Thing is, I have the leeway to work in some, uh, more legally ambiguous ways. I can lie about who I am, pay people for information. Reporters can’t. Or shouldn’t. So this is going to be mostly about public information, especially stuff that’s not online. The Internet is amazing, but you need to leave the office now and then, interact with people. A good courthouse source is better than the world’s fastest search engine.”

“It’s just so strange, you in bed with the Beacon-Light. Feeney, sure. He’s your friend. But you’ve always hated all the top editors at that paper, especially after the way they hyped your-” Crow stopped to find a precise term for the events of almost a year ago, the trauma whose aftermath had driven them apart for a time. “Encounter.”

Encounter. Tess liked that. Euphemisms had their uses. “Encounter” was so empty, so meaningless, incapable of holding the horror of the attack, the greater horror of what she had been forced to do to save her life. She reached for her knee, for the fading purplish scar that paradoxically soothed her when the most troubling memories surfaced. A souvenir of the “encounter.”

“The money is to drool for. And February was so slow this year. I have to make it up somehow, especially now that I have a car payment.”

“Things will pick up.”

“They better. I have that other gig-the investigation of that charity that you’re going to help me with-but that’s small potatoes. I need this.”

What went unsaid between them was that February was unusually slow because Tess, reunited with Crow-again-had decided she believed in love. Again. And as a reconstituted convert to love, she had declined all offers to gather evidence of cheating spouses around Valentine’s Day, which is to private investigators what April 15 is to accountants-busy, exhausting, extremely lucrative. It was a costly bit of nobility, but she had no regrets. Pangs of anxiety when she had balanced her accounts and paid her bills on February 28, but no regrets. So far.

“How can a newspaper that’s cutting staff afford to pay you so well?”

“It’s a classic example of how corporate accounting works. On the local level, there’s not enough money to hire reporters. But I’m being paid out of the national office in Dallas, and they’re awash in money. My fee might seem outrageous to us, but it pales when compared to the two million in consulting fees they bestowed on the departing CEO.”

And when Tess had taken the job, she had every intention of phoning it in, just freestyling her way through the symposium, and who cared if it was all bullshit and blather? As it turned out, Tess cared. The work ethic passed down by both parents kicked in as surely as the recessive gene that had made her eyes hazel. In the end she would rather grumble about being underpaid than endure the shame of underperforming. Besides, Feeney had gone to bat for her. She wouldn’t want a lackluster presentation to taint her old friend.

Crow, still in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt as Sunday crested noon, pointed a bare toe at the stack nearest him, topped by the photograph of the handsome dark-eyed man that Tess’s eyes kept returning to, almost in spite of herself.

“What are you going to tell them about the Youssef case? It’s hard to see how you can think of an angle that hasn’t already occurred to the newspaper. Much less the Justice Department, the FBI, the Howard County police…”

“Oh, that one’s about reading between the lines. The investigation-and the story-has stalled for reasons that no one wants to discuss in public. I’m going to connect the dots.”

“Can you prove your theory?”

“No, but that’s the beauty of the project. I don’t have to prove anything. I just have to have plausible explanations.”

“Homicide as intellectual exercise. Seems like…” Crow bent over his puzzle, filled in a line. “Bad karma. Eight letters. Yes, exactly. It fits. Done.”

“It fits your puzzle. Gregory Youssef created his own karma.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef had disappeared on the eve of Thanksgiving and was found dead late on the day the media insisted on calling Black Friday. The first twenty-four hours had promised a sensational story with national implications-a federal prosecutor, one assigned to antiterrorist cases, kidnapped and killed. Youssef had been sitting down to dinner when he was paged to the office-or so he told his wife. No record of that page was ever found. He returned downtown. Sixteen hours later his body was discovered on the Howard County side of the Patapsco River, not far from I-95. Early speculation centered on the terrorism cases he had just started working and the tough sentences he had won on a handful of drug cases. The U.S. attorney vowed that such a crime against a federal officer of the court would not go unpunished. For the entirety of Thanksgiving, it had seemed there were only two stories in the world, as reporters alternated their live feed from the yellow police lines at the murder site to the lines of the hungry at area soup kitchens. Death and hunger, hunger and death.

But the Youssef story receded from the headlines before most Maryland families had finished their turkey leftovers. The feds, who usually bigfooted such cases, pulled back with amazing and uncharacteristic grace, all but insisting that Howard County detectives take the primary role. The U.S. attorney stopped appearing hourly in front of local television cameras and, coincidentally or no, resigned at the end of the year. Suddenly everyone seemed content to shrug and deem it a genuine mystery, despite some precise evidence about Youssef’s final hours-an ATM withdrawal in East Baltimore, the discovery of Youssef’s car just off one of the lower exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Then there was the very nature of Youssef’s death-dozens and dozens of stab wounds, made with a small knife that was never found. It was when Tess learned of this detail that she decided that Youssef’s murder had been intensely personal. Possibly a crime of revenge, definitely one of rage. The ATM withdrawal? That was in an area known for prostitution, including male prostitution as practiced by out-of-town boys who considered themselves straight even as they took other men’s money for sex. The information that Youssef was a devout Christian with a pregnant wife had only confirmed Tess’s suspicion that this was a man with a secret life, one that his former colleagues were intent on masking.

But no one wanted to dwell on such details when the victim was such a well-intentioned striver, the son of Egyptian immigrants, a man who had dedicated his professional life to the justice system because he was horrified to share a surname with the first man who attacked the World Trade Center. What heartless soul would make his widow confront her husband’s conflicted nature in the daily newspaper? Gregory Youssef was like a bad smell in a small room: People stared at the ceiling, waiting for the rude fact of his death to dissipate.

Yet the longer it lingered, the worse it looked for law-enforcement officials, who were supposed to be able to solve the homicide of one of their own. Even if the newspaper hadn’t told her to prepare a dossier on this case, Tess would have been drawn to it. The Youssef murder was juicy, irresistible.

“Thing is, the newspaper has nothing to gain by pursuing the story,” Tess told Crow now. “If my theory is right, it will just piss everyone off. But until an arrest is made, there will be rumors and conspiracy theories that are even worse. The U.S. attorney set the tone for the coverage. The moment the body was discovered, he should have been using codes to slow the reporters down. Instead he revved them up, let the story run wild over the weekend, then tried to back away from it.”

“Codes?”

“If he had considered how…well, personal the murder looked, he might have managed to indicate that to reporters, off the record. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It’s done all the time. Or was, back in my day.” Tess had worked as a reporter for only a few years and accepted long ago that she was more temperamentally suited to life as a private investigator. But she still had some nostalgia for her newshound phase.

“So why isn’t the prosecutor doing that now?”

“You can’t put the news genie back in the bottle. Now everyone is left hanging-the poor saps who got stuck with the case, the widow. It was kind of unconscionable, if you ask me. But if an arrest is made, this stuff is going to come out, and the reporters need to anticipate it. Bet you anything it will be some young country guy, one of those ‘straight’ teenagers who comes down here and turns tricks but doesn’t like it much. Or someone like that weirdo from Anne Arundel County, who drove to Baltimore just to pick up gay men and try to kill them.”

Crow made a face.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a distasteful topic, even in the abstract. That’s why this gig pays well.”

“Are your other scenarios unsolved homicides as well?”

“Nope. I’ve taken on that perennial favorite: Can it be proven that State Senator Wiley Staunton doesn’t actually live in the district he claims as his home? Hard to prove a negative, but it turns out the Beacon-Light reporters neglected to pull a pretty basic record-the guy’s voting registration. He may represent the Forty-seventh, but he’s been voting in the Forty-first for the last sixteen years. That’s a story in itself. You’ll probably see that on page one of the paper by week’s end. I’ve also got a nice tidbit on the governor-”

“The extramarital affair?” That particular rumor about Maryland ’s governor had hung in the air for months, like a shiny helium balloon bobbing over the heads of children, tantalizingly out of reach, suspiciously unchanging in its proportions and altitude.

Tess snorted. “He wishes. An extramarital affair is positively benign when compared to what I found in the governor’s garbage. Two words: ‘adult diapers.’”

“Is it legal to search the governor’s garbage?”

“Better question-should the state’s chief executive violate federally mandated privacy laws by not shredding confidential documents about his employees? That’s the real find. The diapers were just a bonus. If anyone wants to threaten me with charges for Dumpster diving on private property, I’ll just wave those. Not literally, of course.”

“But as you said, the reporters can’t break the law.”

“True.” Tess allowed herself another pause-and-stretch on her crawling path among the documents. “But they can use information of dubious provenance if they don’t probe too closely the whys and wherefores of how it was obtained. My hunch is that this whole enterprise is sort of…an overture on the newspaper’s part. I think Feeney’s bosses would like to figure out a way to put me on retainer.”

“To what purpose?”

“You know how banks and businesses can launder dirty money? A private investigator could launder dirty information for a media outlet. Take credit reports, for example. I can get those in a heartbeat. Fact is, so could the Blight, using its own business offices, but that would be unethical-and illegal.”

“Then wouldn’t it be equally wrong to get the same information from a third-party source?”

“Probably. But newspapers are so besieged right now. On the one hand, they’re all playing Caesar’s wife, suspending and even firing reporters for the tiniest slip-ups. But they’re also trying to compete with the weekly tabloids on the gossip front.”

“Would you be interested?”

“I’d like to avoid it. It’s one thing to run a daylong seminar on how PI techniques can be applied to investigative reporting. If they like me, I could parlay that into a national gig. But actually working on stories? I’ll probably say no.”

“Probably?”

“If money continues tight…” She tried for a lighthearted shrug.

“I could kick in more. There’s no reason you have to carry the mortgage alone. I’m not asking for equity, just saying I could pay rent.”

“I don’t see how you could contribute more than you do. I know what you make, and my dad’s much too cheap to give you a raise.”

“I’ll give up my MBA classes, get a part-time gig, find some money…somewhere.”

“No, no. Don’t sweat it. We just need to implement some belt-tightening measures-fewer steaks from Victor’s, more wine from the marked-down barrel at Trinacria. And maybe-” Tess turned her gaze on the two dogs that had been keeping mute sentry at Crow’s elbow, in hopes that a bite of cereal might fall. Esskay, the greyhound, was the unlikely alpha dog of the pair, while Miata was the world’s most docile Doberman. “And maybe stop feeding those two parasites altogether.”

Esskay’s ears actually seemed to twitch in alarm, while Miata’s sorrowful eyes held, as always, untold worlds of misery. Tess and Crow laughed, snug and warm on a rainy Sunday, delighted with the mundaneness of their problems. So money was tight. So Tess had a job she didn’t particularly relish. Things would work out. They always did. Until they didn’t.

Gregory Youssef’s face stared up at her from the floor in mute reproach. He had almost movie-star good looks, but his image had grown meaningless from repetition, another face in the news. They all ran together after a while. The guy who killed his wife, the guy who got killed, the guy who raped and pillaged his company. Four months after his murder, all Youssef’s face evoked was a vague sense that one had seen him somewhere before. Oh, yeah, that guy. Everyone knew of him, yet no one really knew him. As Tess studied the photo, it seemed to dissolve into a series of dots until his face disappeared completely, became an abstraction. Yet he would never become abstract or obscure to his widow. Tess hoped Mrs. Youssef had found a version of the truth that allowed her peace, no matter how wrong it might be. Who could be mean enough to begrudge her the myths that would pull her through, the story she was even now preparing to tell a child who had never known his father? Besides, Youssef’s secret life, whatever it was, didn’t void his love for his wife. People were more complicated than that.

The problems of three people didn’t amount to a hill of beans, Bogart tells Bergman. But a hill of beans can seem mountainous when it’s your hill of beans. Tess actually felt a tear welling up in her eye, and she swabbed it with a corner of her T-shirt. What was wrong with her? She had started crying over The Longest Yard last night, too, although she had told Crow it was because she was imagining what a desecration the remake would be. Truth was, she had been blubbering for Caretaker, the sly fixer who could anticipate everything but his own death.

She must be premenstrual. Or more anxious about her financial status than she was willing to admit. She shouldn’t, in hindsight, have turned down all that work around Valentine’s Day. A fussy private detective was a paradox, like a gardener who refused to touch soil or mulch or fertilizer. Tess had come to embrace Dumpster diving, because a hot shower banished the experience so readily. Entering a man’s secret life, even in theory, made her feel far dirtier.

Now Youssef’s staring face seemed castigating, accusing. Tess placed a stack of papers over it and returned to the confidential documents she had found in the governor’s trash, including copies of several e-mails that would seem to indicate that the governor’s wife had been directly involved in a smear campaign against the Senate president. Really, couldn’t the state of Maryland afford to requisition a shredder for the governor’s mansion?

MONDAY
2

“Shit.”

Crow couldn’t have been inside the Holy Redeemer parish hall more than ten minutes tops, dropping off produce that the East Side soup kitchen would stretch into salad for three hundred. How had his right rear tire, which had started the journey as plump and round as the others, gone so suddenly flat?

Worse, it wasn’t even his tire. It was Tess’s, on her precious Lexus SUV, which she had lent him reluctantly because Sunday’s rain had turned to Monday’s snow and sleet-what the local weather forecasters called a wintry mix-and Crow had deliveries to make all over Baltimore. She had insisted on taking his Volvo for her shorter trip downtown. The Volvo wasn’t bad in the snow, but it needed a new muffler and a brake job that Tess thought Crow couldn’t afford. And it was easier to let her continue thinking that for now than to get his car repaired.

“You want help changing that, mister?”

The young man seemed to appear from nowhere on the empty street. Fifteen or sixteen, he was ill dressed for the weather, a fleece hoodie thrown over baggy jeans and no gloves on the raw, chafed hands that-oh, so providentially-held a tire tool. At least he had a pair of Timberlands, although the brand had lost its cachet. Maybe that was the reason he was willing to expose the pristine suede to the elements.

“I mean, if you’ve got a spare, I can take off the lug nuts.” He brandished the tool in his hand.

How convenient, as Tess would have said. But then, Tess would have been onto this kid the moment he appeared. Crow had allowed him the benefit of the doubt. Only for a second, but it was that split second of optimism that defined the difference between them. He was the original half-full guy, while she saw everything as half empty.

“I can change my own tire,” Crow said shortly. “Is it simply flat, or did you puncture it?”

The young man widened his eyes in an excellent show of innocence, undercut only by their amber color and cat shape, which suggested an innate cunning. “Hey, I just happened to be walking by earlier and I saw it was flat, so I went home and got this. I didn’t do shit to your tire.”

“Sure.” Crow popped the trunk, grateful that Holy Redeemer was his last delivery of the day. At least he didn’t have to shift boxes of food to get to the spare. He moved quickly and capably. It wouldn’t be the first tire he had changed, or even the worst circumstances under which he had changed one. The ever-shifting precipitation was now a light, fluffy snow, and the wind had died. In early winter such a snowfall would have been picturesque. In the penultimate week of March, it was merely depressing.

“You need help?”

“Not really.”

Still, the young man lingered, offering commentary as Crow worked. “That’s a little tight, ain’t it?” he said of one lug nut. Then: “That’s a decent whip, but I prefer the Escalade or the Expedition. Like they say: If you gonna go, go big. These Lexuses is kinda small.”

And finally, when everything was done: “So can I have ten dollars, man?”

Even Crow found this a bit much. “For what? Giving me a flat tire or irritating the hell out of me while I changed it?”

“I tol’ you, I didn’t do shit to your tire.” A pause. “Five dollars?”

“I don’t think so.”

“C’mon, man. I’m hungry.”

It was a shrewd appeal. A white man in a Lexus SUV bringing food to a soup kitchen should be suffused with guilt and money, enough to throw some cash at a hungry adolescent, even one who had punctured his tire.

And it worked.

“You’re hungry?”

“Starvin’.” He patted his stomach and pushed out his lower lip. He wasn’t exactly a handsome kid, but there was something compelling about his face. The eyes might seem sly, but the grin was genuine, almost sweet. “Like those commercials. You know, ‘You can feed this child for seventeen cents a day-or you can change the channel.’ ’Course it’s more than seventeen cents here. We ain’t in Africa, ya feel?”

“Okay, get in the car, we’ll go buy you a sandwich.”

“Naw, that’s okay. I just wanted to buy groceries and shit.”

“How many groceries can you buy for five dollars?”

“I could get a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a large soda down at the Korean’s.”

“What about the Yellow Bowl? I’ll spring for a full lunch.” The Yellow Bowl was a well-known soul food restaurant not too far away.

An Elvis-like curl of the lip. “I don’t eat that country shit.”

“Look, you name the place and I’ll take you there for lunch.”

“Anyplace?”

“Anyplace in the Baltimore metro area.”

“How about Macaroni’s?”

“Marconi’s?” The choice couldn’t have been more surprising. The restaurant was one of the city’s oldest, a fussy, white-tablecloth landmark where H. L. Mencken had dined in his prime. The only thing that had changed since Mencken’s time was the wallpaper and a few members of the waitstaff. Tess, of course, loved it. But then, Tess suffered acutely from Baltimorosis in Crow’s opinion, a disease characterized by nostalgia for all things local, even when their glory days preceded one’s own birth by decades. A nonnative, Crow was less susceptible.

“Are you sure you want to go to Marconi’s?”

“Macaroni’s.”

Crow decided to chalk the choice up to that weird gentry vibe in the bling culture, the same impulse that had made Bentleys and Burberry plaid so popular. The kid was trying to aspire.

“Doesn’t matter how you say it, we’ll go there. It’s on me.”

“Man-I got things to do. Can’t you just give me a dollar or two?”

“What do you have to do? Go find another mark, slash his tire?”

“Didn’t do shit to your tire.” Still, he got in the car.

“My name’s Edgar Ransome, but people call me Crow.” Lately he was wishing that weren’t so. Childhood nicknames didn’t wear well as one approached the age of thirty. They yoked you to the past, kept you infantile. But he also didn’t feel like an Edgar, Ed, or Eddie, and his last name sounded like a soap opera character’s. “What’s your name?”

“Lloyd Jupiter.”

“Seriously.”

“I am serious.”

Lloyd scrunched down in the seat, sullen and unhappy at the prospect of being forced to eat at one of the city’s best-known restaurants. He did not speak again until Crow pulled up in front of the old brownstone on Saratoga Street.

“What’s this shit? I thought we were going to Macaroni’s.”

“Look at the sign, Lloyd. It’s Marconi’s.”

“I know what it says. I can fuckin’ read. But I wanted to go the Macaroni Grill out Columbia way. They got a salad bar. My mom took me there for my birthday once.”

Crow considered persuading Lloyd to settle for Marconi’s French-influenced menu, force-feeding him shad roe and lobster imperial and potatoes au gratin and vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce. It had to be a thousand times better than any franchise restaurant. Instead he turned the car around and headed south to the suburbs, to the place that Lloyd Jupiter had specified. A deal was a deal.

“Where is it, exactly?” Crow and Tess didn’t spend much time outside the city limits.

“Out Columbia way,” Lloyd repeated. “On that highway, near that place.”

“The mall?”

“Naw, on the highway to the mall. Across from Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

“You get those Tims at Dick’s?”

Lloyd rolled his eyes, perhaps at Crow’s use of the shorthand for Timberlands, perhaps for some other unspecified ignorance and whiteness and general uncoolness on Crow’s part. “Downtown Locker Room.”

“That the place to go, huh?”

Lloyd shifted in his seat, stiff and uncomfortable. Did he think that Crow was cruising him, taking him out to lunch and studying his material desires in order to extract some kind of sexual favor? Street-level life in Baltimore, as Crow thought of it, was viciously homophobic. Tess had that much right: White country kids would turn tricks and still consider themselves straight, but black kids simply didn’t try to play it that way. You were queer or you weren’t. And if you were, you’d better be ready to get your ass kicked or kick back.

Tess would laugh at him later. Laugh at tenderhearted Crow, insisting on buying lunch for the street kid who had punctured her tire and tried to extort money from him. Roar at the idea of taking said kid to Marconi’s, then acquiescing to his desire for the chain-restaurant glories of Macaroni Grill, slipping and sliding along slick highways on a day when people who didn’t have to drive were being exhorted to stay at home.

Still, he couldn’t help loving her, although loving Tess Monaghan was a challenging proposition, what a union man might call the lobster shift of romance. The summer he was nineteen, Crow had worked for exactly three days at a factory owned by a family friend. His job was to insert a metal fastener in a hole on a piece of cardboard, which would later be assembled into a floor display for a mattress. Because he worked the late shift, the lobster, he had received an extra twelve cents an hour-the lobster-shift differential.

He often thought that there should be a Tess differential as well. Not that life with her was as mind-numbing as those three days in the factory. Quite the opposite. But she required a lot of extra work.

There was a short wait at the Macaroni Grill-it was twelve-thirty now, and the restaurant’s vestibule was filled with a backlog of not-quite-homebound families, desperate to amuse their children on a snow day when there wasn’t enough actual snow to do anything outside. Crow and Lloyd sat on a bench opposite a row of newspaper boxes, and Crow bought a paper, but Lloyd wanted nothing to do with it, not even the comics or the sports section, although he did ask Crow how the Detroit Pistons had done the night before.

“Tell me about yourself, Lloyd.”

All he received was a narrowed-eye look in return.

“That’s my girlfriend’s SUV you vandalized, by the way. Her new-to-her precious baby.” Tess had bought the Lexus from a dealership that insisted on calling it preowned, a semantic shenanigan that had so annoyed Tess that she walked out in the final round of negotiations. The salesman had knocked off another five hundred dollars to get her back to the table.

“It looked like a woman’s car,” Lloyd said. “That’s why-” He stopped himself.

“What? That’s what you were counting on when you slashed the tire? A woman who would need help changing the tire?”

“Didn’t do shit to your tire.”

“Well, you’re lucky she wasn’t driving it today. She’s a lot tougher than I am.”

Lloyd gave Crow a look as if to say, That’s not so tough.

“For one thing, she’s licensed to carry a gun.”

“She a cop?” This prospect was clearly unnerving.

“Private detective.”

Lloyd couldn’t maintain his studied indifference. “For real? Like Charlie’s Angels and shit?”

“A little more down to earth. Skip traces, insurance stuff, missing persons, financial background checks.”

“She ever kill anybody?”

“Once. It was self-defense…’’ He had Lloyd’s full attention now. Tess would rather that Crow post nude photos of her on the Internet than speak of the near-death encounter that had thrust her onto the front page last year. The scar on her knee was slowly disappearing, but Crow had noticed how often her fingers went to that spot, fingering the lumpy, purple-white line as if it were a crooked pennywhistle. Hot cross buns. Hot cross buns. One gunshot, ten gunshots, hot cross buns.

He had a scar, too, but Tess seemed to forget that. Everybody had scars, one way or another.

“She know kung fu? I do.”

Lloyd jumped to his feet, executing a mishmash of moves that appeared to have been gleaned from films such as The Matrix, Hero, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His impromptu performance alarmed the mostly white, all-suburban audience of waiting families. It wasn’t Lloyd’s race so much as his loudness, the sudden movements. That just didn’t play in Columbia.

“She has her methods.”

“Is she like the White She Devil in Undercover Brother?” Lloyd struck another pose, shaking his head violently from side to side as if trying to dislodge a bug from his ear. Crow considered himself well versed in all forms of pop culture, but Lloyd had left him behind with that reference.

The pretty brunette hostess hurried forward, ready to seat them even though several other parties had been waiting longer.

“Where do you live, Lloyd?” Crow asked as he watched Lloyd tuck in to his salad-bar creation, more cheese than lettuce. Cheese, lettuce, and nothing else.

“’Round.”

“Round where?”

“I don’t like to specify too much about myself. But you know, I turned sixteen last fall. They can’t make me go to school anymore.”

“So what are you doing if you don’t go to school?”

“I worked for a man ’round the way.”

The past tense didn’t escape Crow. “Doing what?”

Lloyd gave him a look. “You sure you’re not a cop?”

“I’m a bartender.” Not quite the truth, but more expedient than trying to explain his jack-of-all-trades role at Pat Monaghan’s bar, the Point.

“Why you so interested in me?”

“Because you’re a person, sitting opposite me in a restaurant. Why wouldn’t I be interested in another human being?”

Lloyd pointed a fork at him. “A human being that you think slashed your tire.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

Lloyd grinned. He was so long and bony, thinner than even Crow had been at that age, and he was rampaging through his salad as if he hadn’t had a solid meal for a while. Weekends were light on free food in the Baltimore area, with only a few churches open for business. That’s part of the reason Crow had started using his day off to take supplies to the smaller soup kitchens, the ones that didn’t get as much publicity as the name-brand charities.

“Did not. Word. But I saw the guy who did, and I told him that an old lady had seen him and called the police and he better run. I told him I’d hold his tool for him so the police wouldn’t pick him up. Then I waited for you to come back. Tire was already flat, right? No harm in helping out.”

His last words echoed in Crow’s brain. It was true, despite what Tess maintained. There could be no harm in helping anyone.

“Lloyd, tell me straight: You got a place to sleep tonight? The temperature’s supposed to go down into the twenties.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, but when I take you home, I’m taking you to an address and watching you go inside. In fact, I’m coming inside with you and meeting your folks.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Why not?”

“Some white dude bring me home, my mom starts asking questions, and she’ll figure out that I wasn’t up to any good, and I’ll be beat.”

Lloyd’s tone and reasoning were persuasive, but he had hesitated just long enough for Crow to know he was lying.

“But according to you, all you did was take advantage of someone else’s crime.”

“Yeah, but she won’t believe that. My mama ain’t got much use for me.”

“Lloyd-do you live with your mom? Or any adult? Is anyone looking out for you?”

Their entrées arrived-the speed of the service was setting records, as if the staff could not be free of Lloyd and Crow soon enough-and Lloyd busied himself with spaghetti and meatballs. He ate as a child might, Crow noticed, holding the fork in his fist, cutting the strands instead of winding them around the fork.

“I’m not dropping you off on the street, not in this weather. Either I take you to a place where an adult comes to the door and vouches for you or I’ll find you a shelter bed-”

“No fucking shelters!” Lloyd almost yelped in his distress. “You show up there, you young, they call juvenile services or social services and they haul you away for what they say is your own good. That ain’t for me.”

“Then I’ll take you to where I live. Just for the night, okay? You can sleep in the spare bedroom, and I’ll take you back to the neighborhood tomorrow morning. Even drop you off at school, if you like.”

“Told you, I’m sixteen. I don’t have to go.”

“Fine, Lloyd. You don’t have to go. But do you want to go?”

“Hell no.” His look was scornful, contemptuous of the very idea that one could want to go to school if it wasn’t required by law. Crow decided to change his tack, to become Lloyd’s supplicant, allow him the illusion that he had the upper hand in their dealings.

“Here’s the thing, man. I need you to tell my girlfriend what happened with her car. She’s going to be pissed about the tire, and she’s not going to believe me.”

“What-you whipped?”

“A little,” Crow said. “A little.”

Of course, if he were truly cowed by Tess, he wouldn’t dare bring Lloyd Jupiter home with him.

“Women,” Lloyd said with a world-weary sigh, as if he had a lifetime of experience.

“They can be demanding. But they’re usually worth the effort.”

“True dat,” Lloyd said, reaching for a fistful of garlic bread. “Can I have dessert?”

3

“Surveillance isn’t for amateurs,” Tess Monaghan told the bright young faces that stared unnervingly up at her from the seats of the Beacon-Light’s small auditorium, a spanking-new addition to a building that seemed to be under constant renovation. “Remember the Miami Herald and Gary Hart? They staked out his apartment but didn’t realize it had a back door. There’s no such thing as partial surveillance. That’s a classic amateur mistake.”

“But you were an amateur, right?” one of the men asked. It was that logy middle section of the afternoon, the Q-and-A portion of her presentation, and Tess had long ago figured out that this particular reporter was far more interested in his own Q’s than in anyone else’s A’s. She wasn’t sure of his name, which had been given in a flurry of handshakes and greetings over coffee at 10:00 A.M. and reiterated during the lunch break. The men here all looked alike-Ivy League preppy with floppy hair, khaki trousers, and button-down shirts with sleeves rolled up to the exact point just below the elbow, almost as if they had been measured with a ruler. And all white. The male reporters picked for this tutorial in investigative techniques were extremely white, white-white, so white that they made Tess doubt her own credentials as a Caucasian.

As for the women, there were only two, and they were a study in contrasts. One was a demure blonde afraid to make eye contact, while the other was an exotic blend of races who might have wandered in from the Miss Universe pageant. The newspaper probably counted her three or four times over when cooking its diversity stats.

“If you mean I had no formal training as a private investigator, then yes, I started as a self-taught amateur. But I apprenticed to a PI, as required by law, and took over his agency when he retired to the Eastern Shore.”

This was true, as far as it went. Tess seldom bothered to explain that she had never met her mentor face-to-face. Edward Keyes was a retired Baltimore cop and old family friend. As a former detective, he was given a PI’s license automatically and then “hired” Tess. He had signed the incorporation papers, expedited her license, and sold her the agency for a dollar, all without leaving his home on the Delaware shore.

“Tess was a reporter at the Star,” Kevin Feeney put in. “But in just three years, she’s had a lot of success running her own business.”

“Are you expanding?” the same floppy-haired man demanded. “Taking on staff? Landing big corporate accounts?”

“Well, I got this one.” This earned her a generous laugh. Apparently her interrogator wasn’t popular with his colleagues either. “As for expansion, I don’t think I’d be particularly good at managing others. ‘Hell is other people,’ as Sartre said. Instead I work with a loose network of female PIs, nationwide. We trade out our time and brainstorm together, but we remain independent contractors.”

“Why all women?”

“Why not?” No laugh this time, just stony looks of confusion, although Tess thought she saw Miss Universe hide a smile behind her left hand while raising her right and waiting to be recognized. The men raised their hands, too, but they seldom waited for Tess to call on them.

“Is your work dangerous?” Miss Universe asked.

“Not if I’m doing it right.”

Her one insistent questioner was not done. “But you killed a man, right? Didn’t you have to kill someone in self-defense?”

Her grin faded, and behind the podium her hand reached instinctively for her knee. “Yes.”

“How does it feel-”

“One more question,” Feeney cut in. “Preferably from someone who hasn’t asked one yet. Then it’s back to work.”

“Do you actually enjoy what you do?” asked a man at the back of the room. “Your work seems even more dependent on human misery than journalism is.”

The question caught her short, no glib reply at the ready. Tess knew she liked working for herself and was proud of the middle-class living she had managed to achieve, touch-and-go as it could be at times. Just a few years ago, she had been living in a below-market rental in her aunt’s building, carrying balances on her credit cards, scrimping and saving for the tiniest indulgences. Now she had a house that was appreciating so fast the tax bill was threatening to overtake the mortgage-and that was without the city’s assessment division catching up with all the improvements made since she bought the little bungalow.

But did she enjoy her job? The means to the various ends were often unpleasant, a constant reminder of humankind’s capacity for venality. If no one ever cheated an insurance company, much less a spouse, if no one tried to outthink security systems or steal others’ identities…well, then, Tess wouldn’t have been able to purchase a Lexus SUV, even a used one.

She had reunited a family, she reminded herself. Safeguarded a secret that the entire city held dear. Eased a woman’s tortured conscience, stopped a monster in his tracks, cleared a man’s reputation. Saved the lives of three children, whose father remained on friendly terms with her. In fact, Mark Rubin wanted Tess and Crow to attend second-night seder at the family’s house next month.

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I really do.”

After a polite round of applause, the star reporters of the Beacon-Light filed out in dutiful, orderly fashion. Ah, Hildy Johnson had long ago left the building, no matter which gender embodied the part. Once they had cleared the room, Tess turned to Feeney and rolled her eyes.

“In my day it was the television reporters who asked how one felt.”

“Sorry, Tess. I told them to avoid that subject out of common courtesy. He’s not the sharpest crayon in the box. If he were a Crayola, he’d be burnt sienna.”

“Burnt sienna? Feeney, only one person in this entire room even approached beige.”

“I mean he’d be one of those second-class colors that no self-respecting kid touches until all the good ones are gone.”

“Ah, but in that case,” Tess said, “he would be the sharpest crayon in the box.”

Feeney laughed. “There are days when I wish I had one of those little built-in sharpeners at my desk and I could just insert their heads in there. Don’t get me wrong. They’re good kids, bright and earnest. But they’re inexperienced and they don’t know the city. Aggressive, yet hamstrung with fear. It ain’t the best combo. That’s why I was hoping a maverick like you might fire them up, inspire them to ‘think different,’ as that ungrammatical ad campaign had it.”

“The best question I got all day,” Tess said, “was if they made female-friendly equipment for bladder relief.”

“I must have stepped out during that part. Do they?”

“Yes, but I prefer the old-fashioned way whenever possible. Speaking of which…?”

“Down the hall, on the left.”

The newsroom that Tess walked through bore little resemblance to her beloved Baltimore Star, dead for almost a decade. In fact, it no longer resembled the Beacon-Light newsroom of just two years ago. Reporters often complained that modern newspaper offices could be insurance companies, but Tess thought the Beacon-Light looked more like an advertising agency where the employees had been kept in sensory deprivation tanks for too long. There were few flashes of personal identity in the pretty maple-veneer cubicles-no toys or rude posters or dartboards with the boss’s face pinned to them, things once common to newsrooms. It took a moment longer to identify what else was missing. Laughter. Chatter. Noise of any kind. No one was joking or shouting or even berating someone over the phone. H. L. Mencken had once complained that copy editors were eunuchs who had never felt the breeze on their faces. But with telephones, the Internet, and e-mail, far too many reporters spent their entire days staring into the sickly glow of computer terminals, removed from human contact. They were at once more connected and less connected.

Still, stupid and impertinent questions aside, Tess’s gig was a godsend-a nice chunk of guaranteed cash for very little effort-and Feeney was probably right when he said that she could spin it into a regular venture, flying to newspapers and television stations all over the country. With budgets cut to the bone, the big media companies would rather pay a onetime fee to a PI than hire seasoned editors and reporters.

Her cell phone vibrated, and she glanced down: Crow, although their wireless service announced him as E. RANSOME. A daytime call from him was rare enough to give her pause; he was not much for idle chat, and he understood that her work often prevented her from answering the phone. Besides, Crow’s own days were fuller and fuller, almost frighteningly so. “He’s growing up right before your eyes,” Tess’s friend Whitney had observed, meaning to make a joke. After years of a rather feckless, careless existence, Crow seemed to have found his inner workaholic, throwing his energy into creating a reputable music club in the most unlikely corner of far west Baltimore, then trying to eradicate hunger in his spare time. The change encouraged Tess, but it also unnerved her a little, as all change did.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“We’re going to have a houseguest tonight. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“Cool. Some college friend passing through?”

“No, more of a friend in need.”

“A friend?”

“Well, a new friend. An acquaintance.”

“Crow-”

“Tess, I met this kid, and he doesn’t have anywhere to go or anywhere to stay, and-I just can’t leave him on the street in this weather, and he doesn’t want to go to the shelters or the missions, and who can blame him?”

“Crow, you are out of your fucking mind.”

“Why? It’s just one night.”

“There are a thousand whys, but I can’t have this conversation outside the ladies’ room at the Blight.”

The use of the paper’s nickname earned her a stern look from a beetle-browed woman stalking by, legal pad in hand. It wasn’t very gracious, disparaging the paper on its own premises.

“I’ll tell you what: We’ll meet for dinner somewhere, and I’ll size this kid up before you bring him into-our house.” She had almost said “my,” a bad habit. “I could be at the Brass Elephant in half an hour.”

“Lloyd’s underage. We can’t take him to a bar.”

So it was Lloyd now, underage Lloyd. “What does he want, an expense-account dinner at Charleston?”

“What he really needs is a home-cooked meal, something that will stick to his ribs. I was thinking lamb stew, some chipotle muffins.” He was trying to soften her up, naming two of her favorite dishes. It was working.

“Okay. To dinner. I’m not guaranteeing him a bed for the night. I get to reserve judgment on that until I meet him.”

“Tess, I’m not the naïf you like to make me out to be. I’ve got some street sense.”

“Of course you do,” she said, but her assurances rang hollow even to her.

She pushed her way into the ladies’ room. This, too, had been upgraded, the once institutional green-and-peach color scheme replaced with gleaming stainless steel and stark white tiles. A young woman, the multinational brunette from the presentation, leaned toward her lovely reflection, inspecting her invisible pores, her nonexistent lines. Asian? Black? Latina? Possibly all three.

“Your talk was fascinating,” she said when she caught Tess’s eye in the mirror. “Completely opened up my mind to new ways of reporting.”

Tess wanted to take the compliment, but the gushing was too rote.

“Please don’t suck up. It makes me nervous.”

“That’s refreshing,” the girl said, returning her gaze to her own face. “The men around here can’t get enough smoke blown up their butts. I tell you, it’s exhausting.”

Tess laughed with relief. Here was the smart-aleck attitude she remembered, the coarse vocabulary she expected from journalists.

“I’m rotten with names. You’re…”

“Marcy. Marcy Appleton.” Tess tried not to smile. It was such a hilariously all-American, blond-cheerleader name. The girl’s accent was midwestern, too, with broad o’s and a’s. “I cover federal courts.”

“You really want to do investigative stuff?”

“It’s the most prestigious thing you can do here, now that they’re consolidating the national bureaus throughout the chain. And everyone knows that the foreign bureaus will go next. Which sucks, because I came here banking on a post in Asia. I’m fluent in Mandarin, and I traveled throughout the region between college and grad school. Know who they sent to cover the tsunami? Thomas H. T. Melville III, who’s barely mastered English.”

“He’s…”

“The idiot who started to ask you what it felt like to kill someone.”

Marcy paused, took a pot of gloss from her purse, and rubbed it gently over her lips. Apparently she wanted to know, too, but was too polite to ask outright. Tess opened her own leather satchel and revealed the Beretta that she always kept at hand.

“I didn’t always carry this. Now I do.”

The girl nodded. She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Tess, but she seemed to be from another generation or perhaps even a different species, one characterized by boundless confidence and self-esteem. “And I guess you don’t use it as a figure of speech anymore. It would be impossible to say ‘I want to kill so-and-so’ once you’ve done it literally.”

“Yeah,” Tess said absently. “Yeah.” She was thinking, Actually, I want to kill my boyfriend.

“There was one thing you said-about the Youssef case-that didn’t exactly track for me.”

“Yes?” Tess suddenly didn’t feel as kindly inclined toward the girl.

“The federal courthouse is my beat, although all the boys keep trying to bigfoot me on the story. Only nothing’s coming out. It’s not the most leak-happy place under any circumstances, but the discipline on the Youssef murder is remarkable. I can’t get the feds to speak, even off the record, about what a piss-poor job the Howard County cops are doing, and I can’t get the Howard County cops to say anything about what the feds should or shouldn’t be doing.”

“The old divide-and-conquer technique, huh?”

“Exactly. You were probably a good reporter in your day.”

“Merely adequate. But the closemouthed atmosphere you’re describing-that only supports my theory, right?”

“I suppose so.” Marcy frowned. She really was lovely. With a face like that, she probably wasn’t used to not getting what she wanted from men, and the federal bureaucracy was dominated by men, although the acting U.S. attorney was a woman. “The thing is, Youssef was a flirt. I always thought he was kind of hitting on me. But, you know, it would have been unethical to act on it. He was a source.”

“And married.”

“Oh, yeah,” Marcy said, although this seemed a secondary concern to her. The paper’s ethics policy probably didn’t cover adultery, just sex with sources. “Still, he definitely had an eye for women.”

“Good cover for a closeted man, don’t you think? They can be the worst Lotharios of all. Or maybe he was bi. Or his killer could have been a female prostitute. His wife was eight months pregnant at the time. The particulars remain the same. It was vicious, it was personal-and no one wants to talk about it.”

“Maybe,” Marcy said. “I don’t know. In the end it’s so hard to know what goes on in anyone’s head.”

“Keep that kind of talk within these walls. Out there never admit that you don’t know anything. They don’t.”

Emerging from the sanctuary of the ladies’ room, Tess almost tripped over a lurking man, a whey-faced middle-aged version of the young comers she had been instructing all day. Introduced to him that morning, Tess had already forgotten his name, but she retained his bio: a new assistant managing editor, imported from Dallas just a few months ago, according to Feeney. Rumor was that he had been installed by corporate with orders to gut the newsroom budget. When that was accomplished, he would be rewarded with the top job.

“Initial feedback on your presentation was very positive,” he said. He had that unfortunate bad breath that nothing can mask, so it ends up being bad breath with a minty, medicinal overlay. “The reporters said you had lots of insight into out-of-the-box thinking.”

“I hope no one actually said ‘out of the box.’ Or if they did, they were promptly fired.”

“We’re a union paper, we can’t fire anyone,” the editor said, wringing his hands mournfully. Hector Callahan, that was his name. Hector-the-Nonprotector. Hector-the-Nonprotector-Complete-with-Pocket-Protector-Who-Liked-to-Talk-About-News-Vectors. Tess was training herself to use rhymes as mnemonic devices.

“I was joking.”

“Oh.” He looked puzzled, as if jokes were an archaic social custom. “You know, I think that there could be a place for you here. On staff. Well, not on staff-we couldn’t offer benefits-but on retainer, as a consultant.”

Here was the offer that Tess had dreaded, the one she must sidestep adroitly if she was going to turn this into a traveling gig throughout the chain’s holdings.

“That would create all sorts of conflicts of interest for me. Few clients are going to feel comfortable working with a private investigator who also works for the local newspaper.”

“But if we did it on a case-by-case basis-the Youssef matter, for example. If you, as a private detective, fleshed out your theory-did some actual legwork to verify your…um, suppositions-and brought that report to the newspaper, then we could report your findings.”

“You mean, I could be the messenger that everyone wants to shoot and the paper could claim it was just reporting what someone else said. It would be an ingenious way of advancing a salacious story-and then the paper could promptly back off, throw me to the dogs if I made even the tiniest mistake. Have your dirt and make me eat it, too.”

“Being on retainer for the paper would be a steady source of income that would help you weather the…um, droughts endemic to small businesses such as yours.”

He said “small businesses” as if the very concept were distasteful, as if it smelled as rotten as his breath.

“You sound almost as if you know something of my finances, Hector.” She managed, just, not to add the rest of the rhyme now bouncing in her head. Hector the Nonprotector / Likes to Talk about News Vectors / Does he have a brain, this Hector? / That is simply mere conjecture.

He smiled, expelling another puff of minty-bad breath.

“We do know how to do some basic investigative work. Just think about it, Miss Monaghan. Don’t be so hasty. Don’t make your decision now. Think about it, sleep on it.”

Somewhere in Tess’s brain, a cautionary voice reminded her to count to ten, to wait before saying the words springing so automatically to her lips. But the voice was too faint, too weak. Sentences were already forming and heading out into the world, as impossible to marshal as the wind.

“You know, whenever anyone tells me to think about a proposition, he-and it’s almost always a he, come to think of it-seems to disregard the fact that I have thought about it. Thought about it, considered it from every angle, and rejected it. So no, I’m not going to think about it. You don’t need a PI on retainer. You need to devote more resources to hiring experienced reporters who can do the kind of investigative journalism you want, or else come to terms with the fact that you’re putting out a piece-of-shit newspaper that’s interested only in its bottom line.”

Hector backed away from Tess, then turned and, in his haste to escape from this Cassandra-like creature, caromed off the wall with a loud thud, righted himself, and limped into the newsroom, favoring his left hip.

“What was that noise?” Marcy asked, coming out of the bathroom, hands smoothing her silky brown hair.

“Me, derailing my own gravy train.”

4

Gabe Dalesio debated whether he would need a coat to dash over to the courthouse for the 3:00 P.M. initial-appearances hearing, running through the pros and cons with the same swift analysis he brought to everything he did. Pro: There was snow on the ground. Con: The snow had pretty much stopped. Pro: It was still cold. Con: If he stopped at the smoking pad afterward, the men who smoked-the DEA agents, Customs, ATF, even IRS-almost never wore top-coats, no matter how bitter the day, and Gabe wouldn’t want to look like a pussy. Six months in, he was still enough of a newbie to worry about the impression he made on the guys. If he could only impress them, maybe they would start bringing him cases and he wouldn’t have to play second goddamn chair on other AUSA’s cases. The smoking pad was usually a reliable place for nicotine freaks to bond, but he had yet to make a single real friend.

If only the boss smoked. That would be a golden opportunity. But the interim U.S. attorney was a pinch-faced, uncharmable woman. Lesbo? Gabe didn’t automatically assume that a woman was gay just because she was immune to what all his female relatives had long assured him was a completely irresistible charm. Still, one had to consider the possibility. He almost hoped for her sake that she was, because he couldn’t imagine what kind of man would want to be with her. Fugly bitch.

He left his coat in his office, a decision he regretted when he felt the air. He regretted it more when he finished the mind-numbing routine of extraditing the lowlife of the day and saw that two middle-aged secretaries were the only people on the slice of patio allotted to the federal courthouse’s smokers. They welcomed Gabe nicely enough, and he flashed his boyish smile. Force of habit. Besides, secretaries were always worth sucking up to, although these two didn’t seem particularly interested in him. Perfunctory greetings exchanged, they turned back to their conversation, which centered on what they had done over the weekend.

Weekend talk-that was the mark of going-nowhere losers in Gabe’s head, people who were always talking about their weekends, either the one just past or the one about to come. It was why he had been such a bad fit in Albuquerque with all those outdoorsy types, whose jobs seemed to exist only to support their skiing and hiking habits. That and the fact that he didn’t speak any Spanish beyond sí and huevos rancheros, and he couldn’t give a shit about immigration casework. Gabe didn’t even like three-day weekends, feeling they disrupted the rhythm of work. January and February had been a bitch for just that reason. The Christmas holidays finally over, all he had wanted to do was work, get some traction, and here came Martin Luther King Day and then Presidents’ Day. The city even took a holiday for Lincoln ’s birthday, which he found totally bush. But then he found everything about Baltimore bush league.

Gabe wasn’t a monk. If he met a woman worth dating, he’d take her out to a restaurant, try to extract the reasonable quid pro quo. (And any woman who said she didn’t operate on a sliding scale, who claimed to behave no differently whether it was the Double-T Diner or Charleston, was lying through her teeth.) He went to the gym, sometimes took in a Ravens game, although the brokers’ prices were steep and he couldn’t accept anything from anyone. The ethics policy for federal prosecutors was about as strict as they come: Nothing from nobody. They couldn’t even accept freebies to redistribute to orphans, for Christ’s sake. But Gabe was cool with that. He wasn’t consciously preparing himself for Senate confirmation down the road, but he’d be ready just in case. His life was going to be so clean it squeaked.

Besides, what was wrong with dreaming big? You had to be able to envision something in order to achieve it. Once, he had read this interview with the guy who did the Dilbert cartoon, and he said he had used visualization techniques, that self-actualization thing where you write down what you want every day, over and over again. Gabe had been a little scared to try the writing-down part-it would be too embarrassing if someone found those hopeful sentences, as damning as a teenage girl twining her initials with some boy’s-but yes, in his mind he pictured himself in the robes of the federal judiciary. Look, someone had to be a federal judge. Why not him?

He took one last greedy drag, staring balefully at the ridiculous piece of modern art on the tiny patch of courthouse lawn. It was Gabe’s understanding that the twisty piece of orange, blue, and yellow metal had long been the unchallenged title holder for ugliest piece of public art in Baltimore, but it had gained some serious competition from a towering man-woman figure outside the train station. That hermaphrodite monstrosity had been the first thing Gabe had seen when he made the trip down from New Jersey for his job interview, this giant male-female of steel, with a pulsing purple-blue light where the heart should be. It completely dwarfed the train station. Gabe was no philistine, but what message was such a statue trying to send? Welcome to Baltimore, the capital of androgyny. Welcome to Baltimore, the land of hollow people. Welcome to Baltimore, pre-op tranny capital of the world, where you can’t tell the men from the women. The last was kind of true, actually.

Gabe had been lured to Baltimore by the former U.S. attorney, a gungho guy who spoke passionately of nailing corrupt public officials, who dangled the bait of vast conspiracies and career-making casework. An Italian-American, he had bonded with Gabe over their loathing of The Sopranos, The Godfather, and every other guido stereotype. Truth was, Gabe sort of liked mob shows, not that he was the kind of guy to park himself in front of the television on a regular basis. Anyway, he was only half Italian. His mother was German-Irish. She had the Irish charm, if not the German mania for cleanliness, and her emotions ran as freely as water. Meanwhile his Italian dad was as starchy and reticent as any WASP, a shirt-and-tie civil servant. So Gabe could, and did, play his identity numerous ways-Horatio Alger boy made good, solid middle-class citizen used to creature comforts, arm-waving Italian, poetic Irishman, orderly German. Some people might call that phoniness, but Gabe considered his ability to fit in with others a social nicety. He didn’t lie, not exactly. He just played up whatever part of himself made others feel comfortable.

He put his cigarette out in the ceramic container, one of those overdesigned contraptions intended to be mildly decorative. Someone made that, Gabe thought, although probably not in this country. That was someone’s job, poor bastard. Most people had jobs like that. Meaningless, disposable, of no import. Whatever his frustrations, his work mattered. He never lost sight of that.

He checked his watch and realized he needed to get to the staff meeting. An oddity, scheduled for day’s end on a Monday instead of a Friday, suggesting that it might actually be about something. But whatever the topic, it would circle back to the Youssef case. All the meetings did.

He arrived for the 4:30 P.M. meeting at exactly 4:29. Punctual but busy, that was the message to send. Show up five minutes early and everyone wondered why you were so free. One second after the boss, and you were toast. With the calculation that Gabe brought to everything at work, he chose a seat in the middle of the room, one where he could make eye contact with the boss but also steal looks at Lombard Street if it got too deadly dull.

He listened attentively, looking for opportunities to contribute, but only if he could be original, meaningful. No talking for talking’s sake. Still, no matter how on point Gabe was, he never seemed to earn more than an impatient frown. The boss woman just wasn’t in his corner. True, she hadn’t hired him and she wasn’t here for the long term, but her indifference bothered Gabe. Why didn’t she like him? He was good and eager and hardworking. In his head he was a rising star, and his inability so far to persuade others of that fact had been the biggest shock of his postcollege life. After a lackluster year with a Wall Street firm, he decided the federal system would be more of a meritocracy, less inclined to be impressed by prestigious law schools and things like law review. Albuquerque had been okay, but Baltimore was supposed to be closer to the center of things, especially terrorism. So he came back east, only to find out that they now thought Al Qaeda was infiltrating Mexico. Gabe never seemed to be in the right place at the right time.

The meeting was just a regular staff meeting, a nuts-and-bolts thing, but the boss lady did bring up Youssef at the end.

“I know you don’t want anyone in this office to talk to the press about Greg,” said one of the more senior prosecutors, a woman on whom the boss just doted, Terri Hamm. She got the hot cases, the big drug dealers, the gang members who were getting federal death-penalty sentences. Again, it was a matter of having the connections, of knowing the agents who would bring you the good stuff. Youssef had been doing a lot of those cases before he moved to antiterrorism.

“I don’t want anyone in the office to talk to the press, period,” Gail said, and everyone laughed dutifully. A joke, but not.

“The thing is, that lets the Howard detectives off the hook, because no one’s calling them on what a shitty job they’ve done. And the less that’s said, the more people on talk radio feel free to indulge in wild speculation, some of which leads right back to this office. We look awful, through no fault of our own.”

“It is a delicate situation,” conceded the boss. “But I’m more concerned with Greg’s widow than with public perception. And I don’t think talk radio represents mainstream opinion.”

“Still, it shakes people’s faith in our overall ability,” Terri Hamm said. “The one thing we’re supposed to be able to do is solve the death of one of our own. Why can’t the Howard County police at least provide updates, let people know that the case isn’t completely stalled? They were pissed when the one fact about the ATM got out, but that wasn’t our fault.”

“We have no official role in this, although an FBI agent is acting as an unofficial liaison. And what’s the use of announcing they’ve developed leads if they don’t want the leads to get out? I think they’re right to hold back the information about the toll plaza and the ATM card.”

Although Gabe’s gaze was focused, his expression appropriately serious, he allowed his mind to wander. He had barely known Youssef, who was killed two months after Gabe started, and what he had known made him resentful: the Egyptian wonder boy, the son of a Detroit deli owner. Youssef had gotten a lot of hot assignments for the wrong reasons, in Gabe’s opinion. It was sheer public relations. Forget Abu Ghraib, forget Guantánamo-look at this handsome A-rab who’s working for the U.S attorney.

Still, Gabe’s brain was poking at something almost in spite of itself, prodding and nudging. He risked a question, despite the fact that Gail was clearly ready for the discussion to end.

“The toll plaza-are we talking about the fact that the car went through cash booths, even though it was outfitted with an E-ZPass?”

“Yes. Clearly the driver didn’t know that Greg had E-ZPass on his car-or thought that going through the cash tolls would keep the device from being activated. So we still know exactly when he went through the McHenry Tunnel and when he entered and exited the New Jersey Turnpike.”

“But there’s another time, right? Not just on the trip north, when we think the killer panicked and headed to a place he knew so he could dump the car and get away, but on the trip out of the city, right?”

The boss lady sighed, not bothering to conceal her impatience. “Yes. What’s your point, Gabe?”

“Nothing.”

But something had clicked for him. He just didn’t want to feel his way through the idea in front of this throng.

The meeting ended, and Gabe’s little brainstorm might have moved on, replaced by his own work, uninspiring as it was. But on his next trip to the smoking pad, he saw Mike Collins, a DEA agent, the kind of guy that other guys wanted to impress, even if he wasn’t the star he used to be. Collins had a fierce rep. Strong, broad-shouldered, laconic, Collins never wasted a word. He barely wasted a facial expression.

“You and Youssef were buddies, right?” Gabe ventured.

“We worked on some cases together. I wouldn’t call him a friend.”

“But you knew him, right?”

That earned only a slow, terse nod.

“So did you see him as a secret faggot?”

“I don’t talk shit. About anyone.” With just that handful of words, Collins made it clear that Youssef didn’t deserve to be gossiped about, while Gabe did.

“I’m not talking…shit.” The phrase sounded thin and mealy in his mouth. “I’m interested in some facts that don’t seem to fit.”

“Such as?”

“I’m just working off hunches right now. I’m not saying I can shoot down the working scenario. But it’s something I want to think about.”

Collins stared at him for several seconds before speaking. No more than three, but they were exceptionally long seconds, in which Gabe had time to consider every way he was inferior to this man. He tried to stay quiet, imitate Collins’s style, but he broke down, rushing to fill the silence.

“It’s the toll plaza. Not on the trip north. The first time, on the way out of the city to where he and his trick are going to do…whatever.”

Collins still didn’t speak.

“He must have been behind the wheel on the trip out, right? If he picked someone up and was taking him to a safer place to…rendezvous. Why doesn’t he use the E-ZPass lane? He did coming into the city, earlier that night.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to leave a record of his movements. People in our line of work tend to be paranoid.” Collins managed to make it sound as if Gabe were not in that group, not one of them.

“But if you’ve got the thing, it still registers. Using a pay lane doesn’t keep it from engaging.”

Collins shrugged. “Depending on traffic, you can’t always control what lane you end up in. Especially coming onto the highway from Boston Street, as Youssef is thought to have done. That would have been the fastest way from Patterson Park. You get hemmed in by the trucks, you go where you can.”

“Okay, sure, on any given night. But this was the night before Thanksgiving.”

This time Gabe waited Collins out, using his cigarette as a prop. True, he drew on it until it was almost burning ash between his fingers, but he didn’t start babbling again.

“So?” Collins finally asked.

“I happened to drive home that night, to my folks’ place in Trenton. And every toll lane along I-95 was stacked to hell and back. I would’ve killed for E-ZPass. If I weren’t a law-abiding type”-he allowed himself a nervous laugh here, but Collins didn’t join in-“I would have risked running it in some places. And here’s Youssef, trying to get his dick sucked or whatever he does, then get home in a reasonable amount of time so his wife will buy his work-emergency excuse, and he just sits there in line, as if he had all the time in the world?”

He barely felt the frigid air, except in his exposed fingers. He was that flush with his insight, that proud of the detail he had caught. Collins was nodding and taking it in, his esteem for Gabe growing larger by the second, silent as those seconds were.

Then Collins stubbed out his cigarette in the sand-filled ashtray and said: “You think a lot about what goes on in the mind of a guy who’s about to get his dick sucked by another guy?”

With that he walked away, leaving Gabe feeling very small and very cold. Except for his face, where the blood now rose, flaming the handsome, symmetrical features that his female relatives always swore would grease his way through life.

5

Tess arrived home to the usual havoc of a Crow-prepared meal, which she never minded. He was not only an excellent cook but a considerate one as well, insistent on cleaning up after himself. So it was easy to tolerate the by-products of his feasts-the bursts of flour, the dribbles of olive oil, the littered countertops.

Crow’s guest, however, was a tougher sell. The sullen teen was sitting at their dining room table locked in a staring contest with the dogs, both of whom seemed highly skeptical. Esskay’s instincts weren’t worth much; the greyhound disapproved of anyone who didn’t fawn over her. Miata, shy and reserved, was a better barometer. Her narrowed gaze and the slight rumble in the back of her throat did not speak well for the young man facing her.

“Hello,” Tess said.

He looked harmless enough-a skinny, almost scrawny kid with close-cropped hair and skin the color of a full-bodied lager. His most striking features were his amber eyes, one with a black dot in the iris, and slightly pointed ears, which gave his face an elfin cast.

“Hmmmmmph,” he said, not lifting his gaze from the dogs’ glare.

“Lloyd, this is my girlfriend, Tess,” Crow called from the kitchen. “Tess, Lloyd Jupiter. He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

“A while?” Tess echoed. “No, I’m not,” Lloyd said.

“Well, you’re definitely staying here for the night.”

Tess poured a glass of red wine for herself and Pellegrino for Lloyd, who sniffed suspiciously at the bubbles before he sipped it.

“This 7-Up got no taste,” he said.

“It’s water. I’m afraid we don’t keep soda in the house. Where do you go to school?” She was determined to be a good hostess.

“I don’t.”

“Where did you go before you dropped out?”

“Didn’t say I dropped out.”

“Sorry-I just assumed. So did you? Go to school and then drop out? Graduate early? Or are you just truant?”

“I was over at Clifton Park. It didn’t have much for me.”

“What do you do now?”

“I get by.”

“Puncturing people’s tires and then offering to help change them. I heard.” Crow had briefed her on that part while she was driving home, perhaps banking on Tess’s inability to work up a truly righteous rage at him while distracted by rush-hour traffic.

“I didn’t. Another kid did it. Look, you got television? Xbox?”

“There’s a television in the den, which doubles as my office and our guest room. No Xbox or PlayStation, I’m afraid. The only computer game we have is the chess software that came loaded on my laptop.”

“Can I see it?”

Tess took him to her office and set up the wireless laptop. Lloyd didn’t actually know how to play, she noticed. He asked for the computer’s recommendations and sometimes tried to move pieces in ways that were promptly disallowed. But it was a game on a screen, which seemed to satisfy him.

“Hey,” he said after a moment. “This computer’s talking to me.”

“Well, it gives you suggestions-”

“No, it’s talking to me, in this, like, little box. Asking me about”-he squinted at the screen, sounding out the words-“the giant scam.”

“What?” Tess leaned over his shoulder and saw the instant-message box that had opened in the corner. She must have logged on to her IM account by force of habit. The Snoop Sisters-the unfortunate Yahoo group name used to identify the women PIs with whom Tess worked-were enjoying a live chat, and Gretchen from Chicago had assumed it was Tess who was online. Gretchen’s question was pretty much the way Lloyd had conveyed it, albeit even ruder: So how was the giant scam you perpetrated on Christy Media Inc.? Any chance of the rest of us getting cut in on this action?

Not really here, Tess typed back, reaching around Lloyd, who seem to draw himself in as if terrified of contact. Guest using computer. Will provide details via tomorrow’s digest.

“What is that?” Lloyd’s voice was animated for the first time.

“Just IM.”

He looked mystified, but he didn’t ask for clarification. Lloyd seemed resigned to not understanding things.

“IM, instant messaging. If you have friends logged on to a computer at the same time, they can communicate by typing.”

“How?”

He had her there. Tess didn’t have a clue how the technology worked.

“It’s like a phone, sort of, only it’s attached to a computer keyboard. Didn’t they have computers at your school?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t always work and we just used them to, like, write stuff. I been on the Internet at the public library a couple of times, but that was before you needed a library card to use it.” The topic seemed to embarrass him, and his eyes slid away from hers, toward the piles of paper that had migrated back to her office when she finished prepping late yesterday. “Is that your boyfriend?”

He was pointing to the photo of Gregory Youssef, which topped her file on the case, and it took enormous effort on Tess’s part not to laugh. Other than dark hair, Crow and Youssef shared absolutely no resemblance. White men must all look alike to Lloyd.

“That’s the federal prosecutor who was killed.”

Another blank look with no follow-up.

“Right before Thanksgiving. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah, when they jacked everybody up.”

It was Tess’s turn to look confused.

“They, like, picked up every player in the neighborhood, took ’em downtown on all kinda bullshit. Then, like that”-he snapped his fingers-“they let ’em all go. Most of ’em, at least. Some they put charges on, just for the hell of it, or ’cause they was paper on ’em. But they knew all along it wasn’t any of them that messed with him.”

Of course, Tess thought. In the first forty-eight hours, when it was assumed Youssef’s death was job-related, they had probably looked closely at his drug cases, then released the men they had detained without so much as an apology.

“They decided his death didn’t have anything to do with being a prosecutor after all,” she said. “The investigation indicated it was personal.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Not exactly.”

“So they ever find who done it? They usually pretty good at finding out who kills white people.”

There was no edge of resentment in Lloyd’s voice, no political undertone. He was speaking a simple fact. A private-school teacher had been shot and killed in the parking lot of a suburban mall just this month, and suspects had been in custody within forty-eight hours. Meanwhile the board listing Baltimore City ’s homicide victims-mostly young black men-was flush with red, the color used to indicate open cases.

“No, they’ve yet to make an arrest in the death of Gregory Youssef.”

“You-who?” His voice cracked a little.

“Gregory Youssef, the prosecutor. His murder remains unsolved. That guy.” She tapped the photo.

Lloyd turned his attention back to the computer screen, his posture rigid, his fingers poised above the keys like a bird’s talons, curved and prehensile. He seemed not offended but suddenly annoyed by Tess’s presence, irritable. “How come the horses can’t move straight?”

“The knights. And I don’t know the whys of chess. Crow’s good at it, but it doesn’t play to my strengths. I suck at what our chief executive calls strategery. I prefer the Pickett’s Charge approach to life.”

“What?”

“ Gettysburg?” It didn’t seem to register. “The Civil War?”

“Oh, yeah. That.”

“ Gettysburg was one of the pivotal battles in the war, the so-called high tide of the Confederacy. Pickett went straight up the middle-and lost all his men.”

“Well, that was ignorant,” Lloyd said, and Tess really couldn’t disagree. Truth be told, she had no admiration of Pickett, and she had related the story just to make conversation. Her tactics were quite the opposite of Robert E. Lee’s. She wanted to lead Lloyd back to the story of Gregory Youssef, and she didn’t dare do that too directly. How could one know the name but not his face, or the larger story of his death?

But the name had clearly meant something to Lloyd-something that terrified him.

“So,” she said, coming into the kitchen and closing the old-fashioned swinging door behind her. When she had overseen the renovation of the house, her father and Crow had tried to persuade her to create a great-room effect, allowing the living room, dining room, and kitchen to blend into each other. But Tess had decided to respect the bungalow’s old divisions. Tess liked walls. “What the hell are you up to?”

“Nothing but lamb stew.”

“We can’t run a shelter, Crow. Not for even one kid.”

“Tomorrow I’ll take him by South Baltimore Station or someplace like that, see what they can do for him. But I couldn’t leave him out there tonight.”

“South Baltimore Station is for adult addicts in recovery, and it has a waiting list. Does he have a substance-abuse problem?”

“I don’t get that vibe from him.”

“He seems to be familiar with neighborhood dealers. He knew they all got ‘jacked up’ when investigators thought Youssef’s murder was connected to his job. The very mention of Youssef’s name made him jumpy and anxious.”

“Knowing drug dealers in his part of Baltimore is like knowing Junior Leaguers in Roland Park. You make small talk with plenty of young Muffys and Paiges down at Evergreen Coffee House, but that doesn’t mean you put on a big hat and sell lemon sticks at the Flower Mart.”

“Fair enough. But he’s a dropout who tried to cadge money out of you, changing a tire that he punctured.”

“No, another guy did it. He just bird-dogged that guy’s scam. It’s very enterprising, if you think about it.”

“That’s a distinction of little difference, Crow. What do you really know about this kid? Just who have you brought under my-our-roof?”

“Taste this.” Crow spooned a little lamb in her mouth, but all the rosemary and garlic in the world couldn’t distract her.

“One night only,” she said. “Then he goes.”

Summoned to dinner, Lloyd said a brief prayer over his food, which made Tess squirm a little at how much she took for granted in her life. And someone had dinged manners into him along the way, although the job wasn’t entirely finished. He gamely tried the lamb stew, chewing as if he were being forced to consume balsa wood but ultimately cleaning his plate. He then poked at the salad, clearly suspicious of the dark green leaves and toasted nuts.

“This lettuce go bad?” he asked Crow.

“It’s spinach. We eat it for the lutein.”

Lloyd pointed with his fork. “This a peanut?”

“Pistachio.”

“For real?” He shrugged and ate it, without enthusiasm, but also without resistance. When he took a bite out of the chipotle corn muffins that Crow had made from scratch, however, he bellowed as if something had bitten him.

“I thought they was cornbread,” he said after gulping down half his glass of water-tap water this time, at his request. “Shit’s all hot and spicy.”

“They’re corn muffins with chilies in the batter,” Crow apologized. “They just caught you off guard.”

“My mother says right people put sugar in their cornbread,” Lloyd said as if announcing a core belief on a par with monotheism. “I coulda eaten cornbread without sugar, but this shit is just wrong.”

“Where is your mother?” Tess asked. “What’s her name?”

Ignoring her, Lloyd tried another bite, and it did seem to go down easier now that he knew what to expect. And he had no quarrel with dessert-a choice of chocolate, pistachio, or strawberry ice cream from Moxley’s, served with homemade brownies. His plate cleared, he stood to return to his chess game.

“Want to give me a hand cleaning up?” Crow asked in his easygoing way.

“You cooked. Why doesn’t she clean?”

“Sometimes she does. But Mondays are my day off and she worked today, so I don’t mind carrying the full load.”

Lloyd looked at Tess, sitting at the table with her glass of wine, scratching Esskay behind one ear. “Did you go spying today?”

“Spying? Oh, no. I just gave a presentation down at the newspaper, talked about investigative techniques.” Curious to see how he would react, she embroidered a bit. “That’s why I had that picture of Youssef.”

“You got nunchucks?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nunchucks. For kung fu.” Lloyd did a demonstration that owed more to Karate Kid than it did to John Woo.

“I have a gun. That’s the best form of self-defense.”

“‘Can I see it?”

“No.” But Lloyd’s question reminded Tess that she needed to lock the Beretta in the safe next to her bed. She didn’t always remember, but with a young guest in the house, she had to be at her most conscientious.

She came back and watched Lloyd clear the table, which had more than its share of suspenseful moments. Her everyday dishes were also her only dishes, a mismatched collection of state commemoratives culled from flea markets and yard sales. They would be impossible to replace, except via eBay, which always struck her as cheating. The quest should be as important as the object when one was a collector. But Tess was trying not to be a person who prized things too highly, so she clenched her jaw and let Lloyd go, reasoning that his agreeable helpfulness was more important than keeping North Dakota in one piece.

After dinner they watched Minority Report on DVD, which Lloyd seemed to like once he got used to the idea that it was supposed to be the future. “Parts of Baltimore look worse ’n that,” he said dismissively of Philip K. Dick’s Washington as imagined by Spielberg and his designers. The movie over, they left him to his own devices, telling him to feel free to use the television or Tess’s laptop. “You can also read anything you like,” Crow said, gesturing to the shelves in Tess’s office.

“You got any comics?” Lloyd asked.

“No, but I’ve got some books about comics,” said Crow, ever game. He brought down Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor’s Krazy Kat, then grabbed an omnibus volume of Dick. “And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight.”

Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance in Crow’s suggestions, she understood that he loved these books. And whatever Crow loved, he wanted to share. Besides, Lloyd might like Philip K. Dick, although she would have been inclined to start him on Richard Stark or Jim Thompson, something hard-boiled and brutal.

Curled up in bed with her own book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Tess finally had a chance to tell Crow what had been bothering her all evening.

“He didn’t recognize Youssef’s face. But the name-the name seems to bother him. He changes the subject whenever it comes up.”

“So?”

“How do you know the name but not the face? Sure, certain beat cops are known on the street. But I’d be surprised if the average street kid could name the Baltimore state’s attorney, much less an assistant U.S. attorney. If you’ve heard of Gregory Youssef, it’s because he was murdered. But Lloyd hadn’t made that connection. He knew that a prosecutor had been murdered, he knew the name Gregory Youssef. But in his mind the two had nothing to do with each other.”

“Hmmmmmm.” Crow was lost in the world of Bernard Cornwell.

“Hey. Hey. I’m just as interesting as the Napoleonic era,” Tess said.

“Prove it.”

In her opinion she proceeded to make her case quite persuasively.

6

Barry Jenkins was the type of guy who always found a way to turn his weaknesses into strengths. Slow, stocky, and patient, he had learned early to make the choices that rewarded his build and temperament. In high school he crouched behind home plate as a catcher, blocked on the football team, then dated the girls who were impressed by such achievements. Work with what you’ve got, he told the guys he had mentored over the years, and you’ll always get ahead. And for most of his time in the FBI, that advice had proved golden.

The bar at the Days Inn on Security Boulevard also fell squarely into the category of working with what you were given. While the other federal agencies were downtown, the FBI was tucked away in this butt-ugly bit of suburbia near the Social Security complex in Woodlawn. This physical distance from the DEA, ATF, and IRS guys was supposed to emphasize the Bureau’s superiority. At least that had been the rationale once upon a time, and that attitude still prevailed. So let those other guys sip imported beer and cocktails in those desperate-to-be-chic downtown bars. And never mind that most of his coworkers went to an old-fashioned tavern in the heart of old Woodlawn. Barry preferred the bar at the Days Inn, a straight-up, honest place. Back in the day, it had been a family-owned motel with pretensions and a fancy restaurant, Meushaw’s. That is, Barry’s family, which really didn’t have anything to compare it to, had thought it ritzy. His folks had brought him here for supper after his first communion, and Barry had considered himself pretty worldly, ordering the chicken Kiev. In fact, it was at the moment that his fork pierced the breaded crust and butter oozed forth that he had vowed to have a life where he would see Kiev, or whatever it was called now, see the whole wide world. And he had. He could honestly say he had done what he dreamed of doing when he was a kid, and how many people could make that claim?

Sure, the younger agents considered Jenkins washed up, one of those doddering types just marking time until he hit mandatory retirement. But that assessment, like Meushaw’s demotion to the Days Inn bar, was all about appearances, wasn’t it? Jameson’s was Jameson’s no matter where you drank it, or in whose company. Barry was still Barry-shrewd beneath his good-boy exterior, analytical, easygoing with people. It just depended on how you looked at things, and Jenkins was an expert at considering situations from every angle. He could always see the whole where others saw parts, hold the whole playing field in his head. “Court vision,” they called it in basketball, but that was one game Jenkins had never played. No speed, no jump. Again, it was all about knowing what he could do and what he couldn’t, and the latter knowledge mattered just as much, if not more. If Barry were one of the fabled blind men locked up with the elephant, he would feel it from tail to trunk, bottom to top, and when he left the room and removed his blindfold, he would know it was a goddamn elephant.

Mike Collins arrived at 10:00 P.M. sharp, on-the-dot punctual as always, which accounted for his nickname-“Bully,” short for Bulova, or so the official story went. It had proved to be an unfortunate nickname for a while there, but Collins had ridden out that mess like the soldier he was. Big and handsome, he could have stepped off a recruiting poster-if the DEA had recruiting posters. But what made Collins remarkable, in Jenkins’s opinion, was that he actually had all the qualities that people projected onto this kind of masculine attractiveness. Nerves of steel, balls of brass, heart of gold. All those metals.

“I can’t believe you wanted to meet in this shithole,” Collins said after ordering a bottle of Heineken and bringing it to Barry’s table, one of several along the bank of windows that overlooked this unlovely stretch of Security Boulevard. But the table was isolated, and the reflection made it easy to see if anyone was in earshot.

“I like it out here,” Jenkins said, thinking, I don’t drive to you. You drive to me. “Why’d you want to meet anyway?”

“This kid prosecutor tried to chat me up on the smoking pad today, make conversation about Youssef.”

“So? That’s bound to happen from time to time. A person’s coworker gets killed, it’s natural to gossip about it.”

“He noticed something about the E-ZPass. Youssef used it on the way into town, when he was coming up 95 from his house. But on the way out, he went through a pay lane.”

“We’ve been over that. The pass works whatever lane you choose.”

“Sure, which makes sense when the killer is heading north afterward. But this prosecutor pointed out that traffic was backed up that night, said it wasn’t logical to sit there in a long line when a guy’s trying to get out, get some satisfaction, get home again.”

Jenkins took a drink, which burned a little. Reflux. Even his own body was turning on him. “He’s right, but what’s it to him?”

“My opinion? He’s sniffing around, looking for a way to insert himself.”

“So what did you say?” He tried to keep his tone super casual, although Jenkins always worried a little about Collins on the verbal front. Their extremely unofficial task was to gather information, not disseminate it. Jurisdictional proprieties may have placed the case under the Howard County police, but that didn’t mean the federal agencies weren’t going to keep tabs on it. Headquarters had technical oversight, but the locals wanted their own eyes and ears. Of course, it was a sign of how queasy the case made everyone that they let Jenkins be the liaison. If they really cared what had happened to Youssef, they would have wanted someone in better standing to play monitor.

“I said”-Collins paused, clearly proud of himself-“I said, ‘Do you spend a lot of time thinking about what goes on in the mind of a guy about to get his dick smoked by another guy?’”

“Good answer.” In his relief Jenkins bellowed a bit, sounding like the guy on the old quiz show with the families. The original emcee, the cocky Brit from Hogan’s Heroes, not the nondescript guy who had the hosting duties now. “That’ll keep him away from it.”

“For now,” Collins said. “But I think he might keep poking.”

“Who is this guy?”

“One of the newer hires, been relegated to second chair so far. Booted a come-up or two, but all the young ones do that.”

“Have I-”

“No, he’s too new. And too gung ho. What do you want to bet he’ll try to take anything to court when his time finally comes?”

“Sounds too stupid to be trouble,” Jenkins said, knowing that stupid people could be extraordinary trouble, the very worst kind of trouble. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. What movie was that? Animal House. Jenkins had been just a little too old to get that when it was released-out of college, already at the Bureau, already a father-but his older nieces and nephews repeated lines from that movie as if they were the Baltimore catechism. Fact was, Jenkins had felt a pang of sympathy for the would-be keepers of order-Marmalard, Neidermeyer, and most of all, Dean Wormer. Well, the world had learned its lesson, hadn’t it? You sacrifice order at a price. Learned it late, but learned it at last. Jenkins had been one of the voices screaming in the wilderness along with John O’Neill, another FBI agent, another guy they screwed over just because they didn’t like his personal style. O’Neill had tried to tell them about the impending threat from Osama, but no one wanted to hear. They busted his balls over a briefcase, forced him out. September 11 was O’Neill’s first month on the job as head of security for the World Trade Towers, and the one man who had been screaming about bin Laden since the bombing of the USS Cole ended up dead. You want to keep planes from crashing into buildings, you need a few more Dean Wormers in the mix.

“He’s ambitious,” Collins said. “You can almost smell it on him.”

“Ambitious and stupid? Now, that’s something we can work with. If it comes to that. For now, stay still. Can you do that for me, Bully? Stay still, stay quiet.”

“Absolutely.”

Collins tipped the lip of his bottle against Jenkins’s shot glass, and they both drank. Jenkins studied the amber legs running down the inside of his glass. He had watched the bartender pour it straight from the Jameson bottle, but he was suddenly dubious that he had gotten what he paid for. Would the bartender have dared to pull such a trick on him? Yeah, he would have. Because the only thing you got for being a regular in the Days Inn bar on Security Boulevard was loser status, even in the eyes of the losers who took your generous tips and smiled to your face, pretending fealty. No one had a nose for weakness like the bowed and bloodied.

That’s why Jenkins liked Collins. Loyal as a dog. Loyal as the lion was to the guy who pulled the thorn from his paw. Collins would die for him, literally. The kid loved him more than his own kids did.

Then again, Jenkins hadn’t divorced Collins’s mom and taken up with a cocktail waitress who ended up being Miss Ballbuster of the new millennium. Fuckin’ Betty. Jenkins had learned the hard way that a guy didn’t have to have much money to attract a gold digger. Betty had seen the way he lived in New York -the restaurants, the clubs-and never made the distinction that it was because of his status in the Bureau, not his salary. And when the status was gone, along with those paltry perks-poof, so was Betty. Neatest little magic trick he had ever seen, a 120-pound woman disappearing into thin air. He tried to tell her that they would live better in Baltimore, that most agents preferred it over New York or Washington. Betty didn’t buy it.

But then, Betty knew her strengths, too. She claimed she was thirty-five when they met, but she was most certainly on speaking terms with forty. She was one of those natural hard-bodies, a freak gift from the gods, because the most strenuous thing Betty ever did was lift a glass to her mouth. The face-the face had been hard, too, and not in a good way. She had required a good thirty minutes at the dressing table each morning to get it to live up to the body, to mask the lines she’d gotten from squinching up her features and thinking about how she was going to separate this guy or that guy from whatever he had. The way Betty saw it, she had maybe one more husband left in her, and she couldn’t afford for it to be Jenkins, not once he was all but demoted.

He glanced at his own reflection in the window. Eighteen months. Eighteen months to the mandatory retirement age. He could walk now with a decent enough pension, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He’d do his time, get to the end, then set up the sweetest little security gig he could find. In the meantime he would pretend he gave a shit about solving the Youssef case. A loser, even his enemies would concede that. It wouldn’t be his fault if an arrest were never made. All anyone really wanted was for it to recede in the public imagination, an easy enough trick. The average joe couldn’t hold a thought for twenty minutes, which is why all the world’s problems kept being trumped by the missing-white-woman-of-the-week.

He caught a vision of his retirement party, sad and empty. In fact, it would probably look a lot like this-him and Collins, huddled at a table together, two pariahs. In a fair world, a true meritocracy, they would be known for the heroes they were. But Jenkins knew that nothing was more unfair than the bureaucracies allegedly devoted to justice.

7

Lloyd had to wait until almost midnight before the house was quiet and he was sure that everyone was asleep. It had freaked him out a little, the sounds of sex coming from the other bedroom, not that he hadn’t heard those noises before. Made them, too, but that was different. These people were old. Well, not old-old, but old enough. And weird. It was like the Brady Bunch parents rocking the bed, like his mama and Murray, and who wanted to think about that shit?

The woman did have a nice shape, though. Solid, not that skinny, flat-ass body that so many white women prized. But she had to be his mama’s age, or close to.

Lloyd Jupiter’s mother, Berneice, had been sixteen when he was born, and she hadn’t done so bad by him. Not great, but not particularly bad, all things considered. She had pretty good judgment about the men she brought home, if you didn’t include Lloyd’s father in the mix. He was locked up or dead. At any rate, he hadn’t been around for years. Her latest man, father to Lloyd’s youngest brother and sister, was downright reliable, sticking with her two years now. Which was good for his mama, but not so good for Lloyd, ’cause Murray was one of those Jamaican tight-asses who had some definite ideas about what Lloyd should be doing, like school, and not doing, like just about everything else.

Given the tension between Murray and him, Lloyd hadn’t been around to see his mama for a while. She was beginning to ride him, too, which wasn’t like her. Before Murray, Lloyd had always been able to charm her, get his way, shake a few dollars loose from her billfold. After all, he was her firstborn, and she felt guilty about so much-his useless father, how her attention got stretched with the addition of each new kid. In her way, she loved him best.

But the last time Lloyd had dropped by, she’d been out-and-out pissed at him-furious over the rumor that he’d been working for Bennie Tep, even more furious at the news that he’d been let go. The truth was somewhere in between. Lloyd didn’t work for Bennie, but some of his buddies did, and they let him hang. Bennie liked Lloyd. People always liked Lloyd, if he wanted them to. But he wasn’t allowed any role in the main business, not after a few disastrous attempts at playing tout. He could do the math, but those fiends were fierce, rushing him so that he lost his place in the count. Which was fine with Lloyd. He hated all work, hated anything with a boss-jobs, school, family. He needed to find a way where he could be the man in charge, but he wasn’t sure what that was. Dr. Ben Carson had come to his grade school when he was a kid, and that had seemed kind of cool, a black man opening up little children’s hearts and fixing them, but it meant so much school, and Lloyd was through with school the moment he turned sixteen last fall.

“I heard about you,” his mother had said, her voice shrill, her finger in his face. “Getting high and shorting the count. You incompetent, a fiend, or just a thief?”

He had shrugged, refusing to align himself with any of those piss-poor choices.

“You know, you can’t even work at McDonald’s if your cash register is light at the end of ev’ry shift.”

“I ain’t gonna work at no fuckin’ McDonald’s.”

“Honey, that’s what I’m saying. You ain’t gonna work anywhere, you don’t get your act together.”

It was a lot of shit to put up with, just for five or ten dollars. He could panhandle that much in a good afternoon.

He hadn’t been getting high anyway, not really. He smoked a blunt now and then, nothing more. What was wrong with that? Look at these two, guzzling all that wine with dinner. Well, okay, they didn’t guzzle exactly. It wasn’t like they were tipping Thunderbird from a paper bag. But that stuff fucked up all different parts of your insides, while weed just messed with your lungs a little, and you had to smoke a lot to do real damage. He had learned all that back in school, the various dangers of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and while they tried to say that weed was bad, Lloyd knew it wasn’t. Sick people got to smoke it in some states, so how bad could it be?

He crept out of the half-ass room they had stuck him in and paused in the hallway, listening. The dogs were his main concern, especially the Doberman. The big, rat-looking dog didn’t seem so much a threat, not unless it got close enough to breathe on you. Dog’s breath was nasty. He waited, his lies ready-just going to the bathroom, needed a drink of water-but nothing happened. No boards creaking, no long toenails clattering on the wooden floors, no lights coming on.

Time to go.

Part of his brain warned him to do just that, only that. Go. Just get away from these people, put some distance between him and them, and hope he never saw them again. In the most paranoid part of his brain, he had almost persuaded himself that he’d been set up, that the woman had sent her whipped boyfriend to go looking for him and drag him back here, knowing what he’d done. But naw, that couldn’t be. It was just his usual shitty-ass luck, the life of Lloyd. Try to make a buck, nothing more, end up with this gungho dude and his detective girlfriend, who seemed to know something that nobody was supposed to know. Why wouldn’t she stop saying that name? Youssef. Youuuuuuuuuuuuussefffffffff. Like she could read his mind. No, the smart thing was to get out.

Thing was, he had come over the threshold with plans, and Lloyd always fell in love with his own plans. If he pictured himself doing something or having something, no matter how small, he had to try to follow through. There had been a poem in school about how bad that was, putting off a dream. Lloyd had allowed this guy to bring him here because he thought there would be something in it for him, and he had been clocking stuff from the moment he got inside the house, calculating what he could carry, what he could sell. In his head he had already made fifty, a hundred dollars easy.

He retreated into the study and surveyed the portable goods available to him. It was some trifling shit. The jewelry would be in the bedroom, obviously off-limits now. He should have sneaked back there earlier. No, never mind, the woman didn’t look like someone who went in for good stuff, judging by her watch and the small gold hoops in her ears. But there was the laptop and a digital camera. Also some DVDs, although they didn’t look like the kind that would generate much cash. They all had the same title. He sounded it out silently: Cri-ter-ion Collection. Wasn’t that the guy who wrote the book about the dinosaurs? Lloyd had liked that book, even better than the movie, because the book didn’t let anyone off the hook. The mad-scientist dude was pecked to death by his own little monsters, while the movie made out that he was some white-bearded Santa Claus guy. Villains needed to be punished proper, in Lloyd’s opinion, although he didn’t always agree with the movies on who the villains were. Like, Spider-Man 2. That octopus dude had a right to be pissed.

No, wait: “Criterion Collection” must be the company that made these DVDs. The real titles were for sure bizarre. Yojimbo. Rashomon. Ran. Ran from what? They were in black and white, too, which meant they weren’t worth carrying out of here. Too bad, because they looked kind of interesting, like old-fashioned kung fu movies. Throne of Blood. That one he had to take, even if he didn’t have a DVD player his own self. Dub did.

There was a big jar of change, but it was too large to carry, and fishing out the quarters would make too much noise. The other electronics were all too big, too, and not at all up-to-date. No flat screen, no plasma, just a shitty-ass Sony no more than nineteen inches, although it would still bring a little something. Then again, he was taking the Lexus, so he could carry more. But he had to travel part of the way on foot, at the end. So this was all he was going to get, one armful’s worth.

At the last minute, he opened up a little box he had spied on her desk, a blue oval with a horned horse painted on it, to see if jewelry might be hidden in it. Unicorn, that was what you called it. Not horned horse, unicorn, and this unicorn was hiding a stash of weed. They had weed. Fuckin’ hypocrites, like all grown-ups. Okay, not exactly, it wasn’t as if they had been in his face, wagging fingers, saying no-no-no like his mama, who used to say yes an awful lot, pre-Murray. She was clean now, which should have been good, but it wasn’t somehow. Man, it pissed Lloyd off for reasons he couldn’t quite explain even to himself, this stash tucked away in a painted box. He pocketed the box, then headed out into the hall, laptop under his arm.

The big dog, the scary one, had nosed its way out of the couple’s bedroom and was now staring at him. Lloyd froze in place, petrified. He hated dogs. He expected this one to start barking and growling, giving him up. He began working on a story. But the dog just regarded him with sad, judging eyes, not unlike his mama’s. Oh, Lloyd, the dog seemed to say. Stupid Lloyd. Bad Lloyd.

The dog didn’t try to keep him from going, though. Again, just like his mama.

The alarm system in the house was no problem. He had made it a point to watch that Crow dude disarm it when they came in, so he punched in the code now, taking it off instant, then grabbed a set of keys from the hooks by the door and sailed into the cold night. It was creepy here, almost like country, super silent and darker than any night he had ever seen, even when he was out at Hickey, not that you were given a lot of chances to stare at the night sky when you were locked up.

Shit. Another car, a real piece-of-shit thing, was blocking the Lexus. He hadn’t counted on that, another car being in back of the one he wanted, but yeah, she had to drive something home. Worse, it was a stick, which was weak, unless it was a Maserati or something like that. Lloyd didn’t know how to drive stick. He’d just have to make it out on foot.

Still, again-it was so hard to abandon his beautiful plan, having already spent the money he planned to make five times over. The house was on a little rise. Maybe he could roll the hooptie out into the street by releasing the parking brake, then come back for the Lexus and head out the other end. What did he care if the Volvo blocked the bottom part? It was a weird-ass street, narrow as an alley. The houses on the opposite side, the ones whose backyards came up to the edge, were big and fancy, but the houses on this side were nothing great. Where the fuck was he anyway? He hoped he could find his way home from here. He had tried to pick out landmarks on the drive here, and he was pretty sure he could work his way back to Cold Spring Lane, which meant he could find Green-mount and then home, but he couldn’t swear which direction he needed to go. The dude had all but kidnapped him, forced him to come here. All he was doing was freeing himself, like a slave escaping the plantation.

He opened the door of the Lexus to stash the goods, and it shrieked. Fuck, that was alarmed, too, and the piercing sound filled the night. He had forgotten about the car alarm. He’d have to take the Volvo now, make a quick getaway. He’d driven stick on a video game at ESPN Zone. How different could it be? But while he managed to get the engine to turn over, release the parking brake, and roll back, the car stalled out as soon as he tried to put it in a forward gear. As he struggled with the gears, gravity took over, and he found himself rolling backward, faster and faster. At first he continued trying to start the car, then realized he might be better off applying the brake. But nothing happened, no matter how hard he pressed-shit, that wasn’t the brake. The brake was in the middle. He slammed both feet down on it hard and triumphantly brought the car to a stop in the middle of the cross street at the foot of the drive.

He sat there no more than a second, breathing hard from the rush of it all, trying to gather his thoughts, which weren’t at their sharpest. Go back? No. What, then? Get away. Go. Run. But even as he fumbled with the Volvo’s door, a huge old boat of a car appeared out of nowhere, bearing down on him. It was enormous, the biggest car-car that Lloyd had ever seen, almost as long as a limo, and strangely noiseless, but maybe his hearing was off-or stunned from the alarm on the Lexus. No, he could hear his own breath, he just couldn’t hear the approaching car’s engine. It was like a ghost car, drifting toward him, showing no sign of stopping. Slowly, gracefully, it rolled, rolled, rolled-and struck the Volvo smack in the side.

Lloyd hit the steering wheel with a jolt, but the Volvo was an older model, with no airbag to slow him down. Ribs smarting, he jumped from the car, even as an old man-a very real red-faced, flesh-and-blood old man-emerged from the ghost car and began yelling at him.

Lloyd didn’t wait to hear what the man was screaming or to offer the opinion that it was the old man’s fault for not braking to avoid the stalled Volvo, or at least trying to steer around it. The guy clearly had had time to avoid the collision, but Lloyd had no intention of pursuing that argument. No, Lloyd ran, heading up the hill beyond the ghost car, although he had a vague feeling that Cold Spring Lane and the city he knew was the other way. He ran through the midnight-quiet streets of this strange neighborhood, wondering how long a black man could run here without being noticed and, inevitably, arrested.

He reached what appeared to be a main street, slowing down to a fast walk, his lungs on fire. He would still be regarded with suspicion here, but he wasn’t quite as out of place. There were bus stops and shit, so he could always say that’s where he was headed if anyone pulled him over.

It was a long and miserable walk in the night air, with slippery patches of ice underfoot. The sounds of sirens in the distance made him jumpy. By luck, and luck alone, he managed to find his way back to Cold Spring, which took him to the Light Rail station. Here, at least, he wouldn’t look out of place.

Stomping his feet in the cold, waiting for the train to come, he couldn’t help feeling…well, angry. It pissed him off, having to leave that laptop and digital camera behind. He wanted someone to blame for his troubles, and he decided it was all that woman’s fault. She would probably make a big stink, too, even though he had left her stuff behind and it wasn’t his fault that old car had rammed him. The dude-the dude, he would want to let it go, but the woman was tougher. She had a mean streak. He’d been stupid. No, he’d been greedy, which was worse. Can’t ever leave well enough alone, was the way his mother put it, and maybe she was right. But at the time Lloyd had just thought of it as getting a little bonus, of making up for the bad luck that seemed to dog him everywhere. He had the worst fucking luck.

Gregory Youssef. It had been a name to him, a name and four numbers, nothing more. He hadn’t thought about that caper for months. Favor done, opportunity lost, just another day in the life of Lloyd Jupiter, the can’t-win-for-losingest loser to ever come out of East Baltimore. Shit. Shit.

He hadn’t known until tonight that the killed lawyer had been that guy, that the name he had buried in his memory was of any concern to anyone other than the guy himself. Did that make him an accessory? No, but it meant he had been played.

He was so fucked.

The train hissed into the station. He didn’t have a ticket, but he was counting on getting a few stops down before the conductor caught up to him and threw him off. As it turned out, he made it to Howard Street before anyone approached him, and he was able to run, avoiding the citation.

It was so cold he didn’t even try to get back to the East Side, just went to the downtown parking garage where the homeless men slept on the steam grates. He hadn’t been there for a while, but he remembered that it was around the corner from that weird-ass orange, blue, and yellow statue.

He was too late for the sandwich run, which some church group did about 10:00 P.M., and the best spots were taken, but he still found himself a manhole cover with some hot air coming up. You got kind of damp sleeping that way, but it was warm and safe. Relatively. He took his coat off and bunched it under his head to make a pillow, and his body’s exhaustion overwhelmed his mind’s jumpy agitation, pulling him into sleep almost immediately. He dreamed about horses, Corvettes, and pork chops.

When he woke up at dawn, his jacket looked as if he had chewed on it, just a little bit. He went out into the day, blinking, almost expecting to find some cops just outside the garage.

But there was no one waiting for him, absolutely no one at all.

TUESDAY
8

“What do you mean, Crow won’t press charges?”

Whitney Talbot’s voice, never demure, was like a ship’s horn when she was surprised or outraged. It sliced through the midday din of Matthew’s, which, admittedly, was not difficult to do. The sixty-year-old restaurant took up only the front half of an old rowhouse, and there were few diners at this time of day.

Still, even in a place used to voluble and excitable customers, Whitney attracted attention. She always did. Tess, who had known her since college, had decided having Whitney as a friend was like traveling around Baltimore with a white Siberian tiger. Seldom dull, always the center of attention, but also a little unpredictable.

“Lloyd has a jacket-” Tess began, shaking hot pepper flakes over the traditional tomato pie. Whitney was having the house specialty, a crab pie, but shellfish-averse Tess never risked contact with the local delicacy. Unless she was desperate to leave a social occasion early. Then a little anaphylactic shock was just the ticket.

“A jacket? Did he steal that, too?”

“A record. He’s already been in Hickey for auto theft. Crow doesn’t want to bring charges because he’ll almost certainly end up back inside. And maybe not as a juvenile this time.”

“But even if he’s not a car thief, he’s still guilty of leaving the scene of an accident, right? And you have to tell police who he is, or you’re liable.”

“Crow gave them a fake name,” Tess said, still feeling sheepish for letting that bit of deception fly. “Bob Smith. No one batted an eye, even when Crow helpfully added, ‘That’s Bob with one o.’”

“Isn’t it illegal to lie to cops?”

“Sort of. But with no real injuries, the cops aren’t exactly making this a priority. And Crow told them the truth when he said he didn’t know how to find our houseguest again. You know what’s really embarrassing? I think the cops thought it was some kind of kinky pickup. Two white suburbanites cruising for decadent thrills, bringing home a young hustler and getting metaphorically screwed instead. They’ve probably opened a pervert file on us.”

If Whitney’s voice was loud, then her laugh was a borderline bray. “It sounds like the damage was pretty minor,” she said at last. “Other than that done to your reputations with Northern District, I mean. You said the other guy had nothing more than a crumpled bumper, and the Volvo’s such a junker you can’t really damage it.”

“Yeah, but he’s claiming the impossible-to-pin-down soft-tissue injury. Worse yet, the responding cops let him go without administering a Breathalyzer. Believe me, he would have flunked. You could smell the gin on him ten feet away. Everyone in the neighborhood knows about Mr. Parrish. He goes over to the Swallow at the Hollow, then literally coasts home, sliding down Oakdale and then making the turn toward his house on Wilmslow. He rationalizes that it’s not driving drunk if his foot isn’t on the accelerator and the engine is off. Just coasting drunk.”

“Well, it’s not like Crow has any money. Can’t get blood from a stone.”

“If Parrish has a cagey lawyer, they might go after me-through my homeowner’s or the umbrella policy I carry for the business. And my carrier won’t be so blasé about accepting Crow’s bogus Bob Smith story. They could refuse to cover me, and even a small settlement would wipe me out right now.”

Whitney didn’t laugh at this. Despite being born rich-or perhaps because of it-Whitney took money very seriously.

“Then Crow’s being an idiot. This kid doesn’t deserve his nobility. You took him into your home, fed him, gave him shelter, and how did he reward you? By trying to steal from you and wrecking Crow’s car. You’ve got to convince Crow to tell the truth and press charges.”

Tess sighed and focused on her pizza, but even a Matthew’s tomato pie could not soothe her. With Crow this morning, she had taken Whitney’s side of the argument. She had, in fact, been far more shrill and unkind. The past twelve hours had been a series of shocks-the jolt of the Lexus’s alarm, the cold air that hit them as they raced outside with only jackets and boots added to their nightclothes, the dogs trotting excitedly behind. The scene at the bottom of the hill, with Mr. Parrish stalking around his car in inebriated indignation, saying some terribly racist things about what and whom he never thought he would see in Roland Park. It was Mr. Parrish’s diatribe, as much as anything else, that had hoisted Crow with his sanctimonious petard. By the time the police arrived, he was adamant that Lloyd-well, Bob-was their guest and that he had implicit permission to use Crow’s car. And the fact was, Mr. Parrish’s mammoth Buick had struck the Volvo so far back along the midsection that Tess was inclined to agree with Crow: Lloyd was stalled in the street at the moment of impact, so Mr. Parrish was to blame for the collision. After all, the one thing that they hadn’t heard that night was the Volvo’s engine, and it was a noisy, raucous car, audible for blocks.

Even so, Crow shouldn’t have given the police a false name for Lloyd. That had been rash, a mistake that was sure to come back and haunt them. The boy was still liable for leaving the scene of an accident, although, given the small stakes-no real injuries, the minor damage to Mr. Parrish’s car-Tess doubted that the police would spend a lot of time trying to find and arrest him. And the insurance companies wouldn’t be much interested in him either. Lloyd had no figurative pockets, shallow or deep, under any name, so Crow’s carrier couldn’t transfer the fiduciary responsibility to him. Yet Mr. Parrish would collect nothing if the case were treated like the theft that it was. No, as long as Crow claimed that Lloyd had his permission to use the car, Crow would be on the hook for everything. Tess’s only hope was that Mr. Parrish’s insurance company, once it ferreted out how few assets Crow had, would give up.

Tess worked a lot with insurance companies. The industry’s very aversion to paying out large sums had generated several small ones for her over the years, so she would never stoop to gross generalizations where agents and actuaries were concerned. She hated to think what another Tess Monaghan might do if presented with such a case. She would make short work of the assignment, getting Mr. Parrish a nice little check and never caring what happened to the irresponsible driver on the other side of the equation.

“Crow may be a soft touch, but that’s a large part of who he is,” she said to Whitney now. “You of all people should get that. You’re the one who told me we had to stop trying to change each other.”

“He could stand to toughen up a little bit. It’s not just the car-it’s being naïve enough to bring this kid home in the first place. Whatever story he’s feeding the insurance company doesn’t change the fact that you nursed a viper in your bosom, as Aesop would say. Took the kid in, gave him a meal and a warm place to sleep, and he rewarded your hospitality by trying to steal from you.”

“The moral of Aesop’s story was that you can’t change someone’s ingrained nature.”

“Exactly.”

“No, I mean this kid did seem to have some genuine sweetness to him. And he wasn’t very good at lying-not when the name of Gregory Youssef came up.”

“Really? Do you think-”

The two old friends, who had once rowed in perfect sync at moments, were still capable of thinking that way. Tess knew that Whitney’s mind had jumped to the obvious conclusion-a young man from the East Side, not far from the neighborhood Youssef was last known to be. Police had assumed that Lloyd was a hustler. Wasn’t he, in a sense?

“No,” Tess said, shaking her head. “He didn’t know what Youssef looked like, so he can’t be the pickup. Besides, you don’t see a lot of black kids hiring themselves out as trade. It’s a weird racial division. White boys from farm country do it, sometimes. They rationalize they’re not gay, just taking advantage of gay men. But the black kids don’t go for that double standard.”

“All the more reason to be covert about it.”

“Uh-uh.” Tess took another bite of pizza. The crust recipe was said to be secret, which compelled her to analyze it every time she visited. It had a pastry feel, flaky and light. And Matthew Ciccolo had started as a baker. A little sugar, perhaps more lard? “Remember, he knew the name, not the face. He’d clearly never seen the guy in his life. But Lloyd knows something. And he’s not the kind of kid who’s going to speak voluntarily to the cops-not without a charge hanging over him, which would force him to make some deals fast.”

“You’ve got the auto-theft thing.”

“I’m not sure that’s enough of a threat to get Lloyd to talk to the cops. You know what the antisnitching culture is like in Baltimore.” The city had been abuzz for weeks about a homemade DVD, Stop Snitching, that showed an NBA player hanging with drug dealers, making ominous threats about what happened to those who cooperated with the police. “But it might be enough leverage to get him to talk to a reporter. Which would sort of make up for the fact that I embarrassed Feeney by telling his boss to go fuck himself. The thing is, we have to find Lloyd.”

“I’m in,” Whitney said, eyes gleaming. It was what made her such a satisfactory friend. She was always up for whatever Tess was planning, even when she didn’t have a clue what it was.

“We’ll need your mother’s car. And”-Tess looked up, catching the waitress’s eye-“an order of curly fries.”

“Are the curly fries the bait?”

“No, my dear. You are.”

“Here?” Crow asked.

“Almost. A little higher. A little to the right-and yes. Yes.”

Kitty Monaghan stood in the center of her ever-expanding bookstore, Women and Children First. It was a family enterprise, twice over. Tess’s aunt, her father’s only sister, had acquired the old pharmacy from Tess’s maternal grandfather, who had presided over the spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall of Weinstein’s Drugs.

Kitty was having far more luck at the corner of Bond and Shakespeare streets, although it had required endless ingenuity on her part. Over the years the bookstore had enlarged its original mission, adding annexes known as Dead White Men and Live! Males! Live! But instead of the ubiquitous coffee bar, Kitty had put the old soda fountain back into service, providing an array of ice cream drinks and baked goods. She let people drift in with coffee from the Daily Grind and Jimmy’s and perch at the counter for hours, buying nothing more than a newspaper and a cookie. Somehow she made a profit.

Now she was creating a gallery space within the store, and Crow was helping her install the first show, a grouping of tin-men sculptures-a firefighter, a policeman, a dog walker, an astronaut-all with the same conical tops, yet somehow distinctive, too. Most of the pieces stood no more than three feet high, but there was one life-size one, and Kitty had decided she wanted it suspended from the ceiling so it appeared to be flying. It was an angel, after all, its face at once goofy and benevolent. An angel with the best of intentions, one that would try to take care of you and probably would succeed in the end, but not without a few bumps along the way.

Kitty agreed with Crow’s assessment of the angel’s character.

“Like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life,” she said, offering Crow a glass of real seltzer. Not the store-bought variety but the stuff that had to be delivered by a New York deliveryman. Kitty’s life was full of people who fell over themselves to do her favors. Crow had come under her spell almost five years ago, when he took a job as a part-time clerk here-and then he met Tess. Crow studied the angel again. Now the smile seemed more mocking than kind.

“I used to think I was going to be an artist, remember? An artist, a musician…all I’ve ever really been is a dilettante.”

“You’ll always be an artist, Crow. No matter how much you throw yourself into business, you’re not going to be able to snuff out that part of yourself. Tess fell in love with you when you were a bookstore clerk, remember?”

“And fell out love with me. Remember?”

“Her faith faltered once or twice along the way. Her faith in herself, not you. Besides, you’re the one who bails, leaving when things don’t go exactly the way you want. You first bolted when she admitted she was attracted to someone else. You did the same thing when she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married. Not that she didn’t love you or didn’t want to be with you. Just that she was unsure of marriage-and of your motives for proposing when you did.”

“I love her. That’s not a motive.”

Kitty may have carried the name and looks of an Irishwoman, but she had the soul of a Jewish mother. Throughout the conversation she had been working behind the counter, heating a cheese tart, slicing fruit, then placing it all before Crow on a large Fiestaware platter. He hadn’t even realized he was hungry, but he fell on the food happily.

“Of course you love her. But you asked her to marry you because you felt guilty about what she went through when she was almost killed. Which, by the way, was entirely her fault. Not yours.”

“She was targeted by a psycho. That’s not exactly something she brought on herself.”

“Fair enough. But the way she chose to handle it-that was her decision, before and after. No one could have protected her. How do you think her parents felt? Or me? Or Tyner? We were all horrified, after the fact.”

“Okay, but why doesn’t she want to get married? Her parents are happy enough-”

“Now. They were a little feistier when Tess was young, always bickering. They found it fun and even erotic, I think, but try to explain that to a five-year-old. The main thing is, I don’t think Tess wants to have children, not yet. And what’s the point of getting married if you’re not going to have children?”

Crow thought he had her at last. “Kitty, you got married for the first time in your forties. Are you planning to have children?”

“I’m not playing by anyone else’s rules,” she said, smiling.

Crow was too distracted to notice how neatly Kitty had sidestepped his question. The physical activity of setting up the exhibit had provided only a temporary reprieve from the thoughts that had been troubling him all day. He had always known it was risky keeping secrets from Tess, no matter how benign. She despised looking foolish under any circumstances. As much as she fibbed and lied her way through her professional life, she was scrupulously honest in her personal one and expected the same from others.

But really, there had never been any point in full disclosure and, more important, never an appropriate time. He’d been waiting for all the stars to align, for Tess’s business to pick back up, so she wouldn’t feel pitied or patronized. Perhaps he should volunteer the information now, to soothe her fears over what the insurance companies might do to her. But she would be angry, and he hated to invoke her wrath, especially when things between them were so smooth, almost honeymoon-like.

Or had been, before he brought home a joyriding thief who tried to burglarize them.

9

By sundown it was clear that Lloyd’s only choices for the night were the streets or one of the mission shelters, which he despised, with their enforced God shit, not to mention all the other rules. Might as well live with Murray ’s bullshit, in that case. And some of the hard-core men smelled so, a nasty funk of wet clothes and body odor and cheap wine. He had been trying to panhandle enough to get into the motel over on North Avenue, which wasn’t fussy about ID and age as long as you had cash, but he hadn’t come close to scraping up the almost forty dollars he needed. As a panhandler Lloyd lacked the natural advantages-no gimp, no limp-and while kindhearted women sometimes gave him a few dollars for food, he could never pull off those big scores, the ones that involved a lot of talking, a complicated story about a broke-down car or a bus, the one where you took the person’s name and swore to Jesus that you would repay them soon. No, all he had was fifteen dollars and some change, and the only thing that was good for was getting stolen.

Maybe his mother would actually take him in for the night. She’d do it for sure if he offered her the fifteen dollars, or even ten, but a mother should stand her boy to a bed for free. Plus, he hated Murray, Jamaican motherfucker always talking about the value of hard work. Home was almost as bad as the missions, especially if Antone, the four-year-old, was still peeing the bed.

Dub’s flop, though. That would work. Cold, but free. Lloyd would buy a sub and a Mountain Dew.

He stopped at Lucy’s and ended up getting a chicken box, which he wolfed down on the steps of an abandoned house a block away. He had meant to take it to Dub’s, share a little, but it smelled so good and warm, and it was heat that Lloyd craved as much as anything. He was down to the bones of the chicken, the Styrofoam box balanced on his knees, when he felt a vicious clap across the side of his head that knocked him to the street, the remains of his meal scattering.

“What the fu-”

The two boys who had jumped him worked silently and quickly, turning out his pockets and taking his change. They must have followed him from Lucy’s. It was business to them. They had seen him with cash and they wanted it, so they took it. Lloyd had no allegiances, no real backup. He was a free agent, and a free agent was prey. It made him angry, but it was like a mouse getting angry at a cat. Way of the world, outside his control.

Luckily, he had stashed the unicorn box in an inside pocket, deep inside the folds of his jacket where they couldn’t feel it. And at least he had finished his meal before they jumped him.

Knees and ego bruised, he collected himself with as much dignity as possible and limped toward Dub’s house of the month. It was boarded up, like most of the houses in the block, but Lloyd knew how to swing open the plywood on the door and crawl over the threshold. Cold, but not as cold as outside, and Dub had collected a good pile of blankets from the Martin Luther King Day giveaway at one of the soup kitchens.

“Hey,” Dub greeted him. He was reading a book by flashlight. Boy was a fool for schoolwork. “There’s a spot over there.”

“You wanna work tomorrow? I’m bust.”

“I could do it after school, if you wanna.”

“Midday’s better. More places. We gonna have to go work some strange territory, we wait until after school.”

“Got a test. And you know I can’t cut, or they gonna send a note home and find out I got no home to send it to.”

“Don’t know why you’re still fuckin’ with that school shit.”

Dub shrugged, pretending he didn’t know either. But Dub was smart. The teachers were always marveling at his brain, and they didn’t know the half of it. No one over at the school knew that his mother was in the wind, or that he hunkered down in vacant rowhouses with his brother and sister, Terrell and Tourmaline. If Dub stopped coming, the whole Lake Clifton faculty would probably take to the streets searching for him. And if he ever got busted for one of their “enterprises,” as Lloyd liked to think of the cons they pulled, those teachers would go to court, ask the judge to forgive and forget. Dub, not Lloyd. No one at the lake remembered who Lloyd was.

But Dub never got caught at anything. That’s how smart he was.

Lloyd picked his way among the others that Dub took in, preferring a spot by the wall, just one less person next to him. Once situated on his blanket, he took out the unicorn box, but he didn’t open it or propose smoking what he had brought. Dub was like a churchwoman when it came to drugs, didn’t want them anywhere near his brother and sister. Was it truly less than twenty-four hours ago that Lloyd had first seen this box, slipped it into his pocket, his head full of plans? He was going to sell the laptop and the camera, buy his mother some flowers or a pair of gold earrings, show up all flush, say he had a job.

But there would have been questions, he admitted to himself now, too many questions, and Murray would have broken him down, accused him of lying, which Lloyd would have denied with outraged innocence, because by then he would totally believe his own bullshit. It wouldn’t have been at all like he imagined.

Seemed like nothing ever was. The thing he had done last fall-but he hadn’t known. It was just a favor. He’d bet Le’andro didn’t know what it was all about either.

It was almost ten o’clock, and even the cleaning crew had cleared out of the U.S. attorney’s offices, but Gabe Dalesio was still at his desk, looking at office reports. Page after page after page of the most mundane stuff. The target discussed women and television shows, the Ravens, the relative merits of local sub shops. But he never alluded to drugs or crime, not unless he was using some elaborate code that they had failed to discern. Perhaps the sandwich orders could be translated into drug transactions. For example, “with hots” might be-But no, it just wouldn’t hang together. There was no doubt the guy was a dealer, given that it had gotten to a Title III. But he was cautious and disciplined-although not so disciplined that he eschewed landlines.

It hadn’t been Gabe’s bright idea to go after this particular dealer. But he had inherited the case, so he had to make it work. Some previous AUSA had been shrewd, shedding this loser. Who had initiated it? Gabe flipped back through the file. Gregory Youssef. Of course. No wonder the guy had lobbied to get into the antiterrorism unit, with these kinds of dog cases dragging him down. No one was going to make a name for himself with this shit.

Gabe’s thoughts returned, as they had almost obsessively over the last twenty-four hours, to yesterday’s conversation with Collins, out on the smoking pad. Do you spend a lot of time imagining what it’s like to get your dick sucked by another guy? A day later, Gabe still wasn’t sure what the snappy comeback should have been. He almost felt obligated to get one of those fat secretaries to lie down on his desk, timing it so Collins would be passing by his just-ajar door, know that he was verifiably straight.

He walked over to his window, which afforded a slice of a view, if you could call it that-office buildings, an old Holiday Inn with a revolving restaurant on top, that strange Bromo-Seltzer Tower glowing blue. He should have held out for a real city, Boston or Chicago. The guy who hired him had done a total sell job, claiming that Baltimore was the best office for those who were aiming up, up, up. Close to D.C., easy to stand out, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and that guy was now hiding out in some high-priced law firm, trying to sock away enough money to retire in style.

Traffic was light-nothing happened in Baltimore at night-but there was a steady stream of brake lights in the street below. He thought again about the lines at the tollbooths. No one would wait in those fucking lines who didn’t have to, regardless of the circumstances. It would be automatic to head toward the flashing yellow light, to glide through as you had dozens of times before. Youssef had used his E-ZPass coming into the city, up I-95. Why would he have been so patient going out?

Because he wasn’t at the wheel of his own car even then. Because the person who was driving didn’t know that the car was equipped with E-ZPass, and Youssef didn’t tell him. Why? Because he didn’t see any reason to expedite his own kidnapping. And if he was kidnapped, then it was a federal crime, and Gabe’s office had every reason to stick its beak in.

The idea delighted him so much that he brought up his hands and smacked them against the glass, in essence high-fiving himself. And if Youssef wasn’t driving…well, then what? How did that jibe with what everyone thought they knew? If Youssef’s piece of trade had already freaked out, where was Youssef? Dead already-but no, he’d clearly been killed where he was found. There had been no blood evidence in the car. Still, he could have been in the trunk, or hog-tied in the backseat, although that might have caught the eye of even the most brain-dead toll taker. But if he had been in the car, alive and sentient, he could have jumped out when the car slowed for the toll, run to the little office maintained by the transportation police.

“Steady, now,” Gabe addressed his reflection in the window. “Stay cool.” He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, running to someone to get affirmation for his latest brainstorm. He would hold this insight close, continue to mull.

He would make his name on the Youssef case, not on Youssef’s hand-me-downs and leftovers.

WEDNESDAY
10

Whitney glided to the curb in her mother’s Mercedes station wagon, an older model that, in the WASP fashion, had not been particularly well maintained. The once-burgundy exterior had faded to the color of a scab, and the window glass was clouded with age.

Still, the car looked like a rich woman’s ride, especially after its deluxe treatment at Wash Works just that morning. A burst of opera escaped when Whitney opened the door, so loud that Whitney must have had the radio set at eardrum-bursting levels. She removed the key from the ignition, took a second to adjust the cashmere scarf draped around the shoulders of her mother’s old mink, and cut across Mount Street without looking in either direction, clearly expecting traffic to stop for her. It did. In her hands-encased in leather driving gloves, naturally-she carried an open cardboard box filled with bags of Otterbein Cookies, purchased so recently that one could almost smell them. She could not have been more obnoxiously conspicuous, her presence all but screaming, Look at me! Rob me! Carjack me!

Excellent, Tess thought from her hiding place in the alley. Whitney was like a piece of cheese in a cartoon, a yellow triangle so toothsome that the mouse in this game of cat and mouse would never notice the figurative box poised overhead, ready to slam down when the stick was removed.

Granted, it was their fifth stop this afternoon, and the plan had yielded no results, although several local soup kitchens had been happy to receive the red-and-white bags of chocolate chip and lemon sugar cookies from this glamorous and heretofore-unknown benefactor. And most of the providers were familiar with Lloyd, Whitney reported back, although they just smiled and shook their heads ruefully when asked where he might be found. Tess and Whitney were running out of stops and cookies, and while Whitney had drawn plenty of stunned looks, Lloyd had yet to put in an appearance.

Still, Tess was certain that the kid’s ruse wasn’t a onetime gig. In fact, once she had thought it through, she found his scheme rather brilliant. Stake out a street near one of the local soup kitchens, pick out a car that clearly doesn’t belong to the neighborhood. In the case of her Lexus, the parking sticker for the Downtown Athletic Club had marked it as an outsider’s vehicle. Whitney’s Suburban, while clearly a rich person’s car-only the wealthy could afford to fill the bottomless gas tank-wouldn’t register as rich in Southwest Baltimore. But her mother’s Mercedes station wagon, with its I CORGIS bumper sticker, all but screamed its Greenspring Valley pedigree.

Crouched behind a ripe, overflowing trash can, Tess kept an eye on the street. A short kid, round of face and body, ambled toward Whitney’s car and, with a quick look around, bent over and jabbed something in the tire. Damn. But she had warned Whitney that it was likely the tire would be slashed, not just flattened. “Mother has a full spare” was Whitney’s airy response.

The more troubling fact was that this squat kid clearly wasn’t Lloyd. It would be a hollow victory, nabbing the wrong culprit. Maybe the tire scam was to inner-city neighborhoods what the squeegee market used to be.

The fat kid, who had the wonderful ability to move swiftly without appearing to, sauntered away. Just as Tess was debating whether she should chase after him, she saw Lloyd coming down the block, tire tool in hand, positioning himself. Another kid did it. I didn’t do shit to your tire. Wasn’t that what Crow said Lloyd had insisted, over and over, with winning sincerity? It had been a technical truth, then. One boy slashed it, another offered to fix it.

Whitney left the soup kitchen, once again making herself as ostentatious as possible-tossing her blond hair, shooting her cuffs, revealing her watch and gold bangle bracelet, also borrowed from her mother. Playing her part brilliantly, she headed back to the car as if it never occurred to her that anything could be amiss, opening the driver’s door. It was then that Lloyd materialized at her elbow.

Tess couldn’t hear their initial exchange, although it did strike her that Whitney was overplaying the damsel in distress a bit, flailing her arms and even chewing on a gloved knuckle at one point. Finally Whitney popped the trunk and then, as she and Tess had rehearsed, began filling Lloyd’s arms with the remaining boxes of cookies, ostensibly to get to the spare.

“The tire’s just here, under this compartment,” she was braying when Tess crept up behind Lloyd.

“Hey, Lloyd,” Tess said.

They had anticipated that his instinct would be to hurl his armful of cookies and make a run for it. But Tess had also counted on a split-second delay, a moment in which Lloyd would hesitate-and be lost. Even as he tried to throw the cookies at Tess, Whitney stepped forward and pushed him into the open luggage compartment, then slammed the door shut and locked it with the button on her key ring. The Mercedes may have been more than a decade old, but the era of child-safety locks had already been in full swing then. The old station wagon also had a mesh screen separating the luggage compartment from the rest of the car, an option added for Mrs. Talbot’s beloved but lively corgis. Lloyd was trapped. He banged on the windows with his fists, cursing them, but there was nowhere he could go.

Tess kept watch over him, even as Whitney ran around the corner to the Lexus, fetched her spare from Tess’s trunk, and proceeded to change her own tire, a task made slightly more difficult by Lloyd’s heaving body, which rocked the Mercedes a little.

“What now?” Whitney asked, eyes gleaming.

“I don’t know.” Tess raised her voice so Lloyd might hear her over his pummeling fists. “What now, Lloyd? Cops? Division of Juvenile Services? Your call.”

“Fuck you, bitches!” he yelled back. “You can’t make me do shit! You got nothing on me! I didn’t do anything!”

“I saw it, Lloyd. I know you’re working with that other kid. All I have to do is call 911 on my cell, and the cops will be here in a few minutes. Or maybe I’ll go chase your friend, who’s almost certainly hiding around the corner, let the two of you decide who wants to take responsibility.”

The mention of his accomplice seemed to increase Lloyd’s rage and panic. “FUCK YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKIN’ WHITEASS BITCH! I will cut you if I get out of here, I will fuck you up, I will-”

“Nice talk. Look, we’ve got you on auto theft, hit-and-run-enough charges to put you back in Hickey for several months, if not central booking at city jail, where people are staying up to forty-eight hours these days before they even see a judge. But we’re reasonable people. You can make a deal.”

“I DON’T TALK TO COPS!”

“You don’t have to talk to anyone but me. For now.”

“Where?” Whitney asked, ever practical. “Your house?”

“Yours. I’ll drive your mother’s car back to her while you take mine.” She thought she should be behind the wheel of the Mercedes if Lloyd did anything unpredictable. “Plus, your house is so remote that he can’t run away that easily. Even if he gets away from us, he won’t get far.”

Once at Whitney’s house, Lloyd came out of the luggage compartment feetfirst, aiming straight for Tess’s midsection. Again, she had expected nothing less and needed nothing more than a simple sidestep to avoid the blow. Still, without Whitney to help her, she would never have been able to subdue the young man. Thin as he was, he had a feral strength, twisting and turning in their grasp, cursing them all the while. The two women ended up straddling him, so his face was scraping the gravel in the driveway.

“Fuck you, bitches,” he said. “The minute you get up, I’m going to kill you both.”

Tess pulled out her gun, just to remind him that she had one-and he didn’t have any weapon at all. Not even a knife, based on her inexpert pat-down, for all his talk of cutting people.

“You ain’t gonna use that on me. That’s not your way.”

“What do you know of my ways?”

“All I did was try to steal your car. White folks like you don’t shoot you for shit like that.”

“You’re right.” Tess put the gun away and pulled out her cell phone. “Calling the police is more my style. County police. I’ll tell them that Whitney and I caught you trying to break into her carriage house out here and that you attacked her. You want to get picked up by county police on attempted rape and burglary?”

“That won’t hold.”

“It will hold long enough for someone to beat the crap out of you in an interrogation room in Towson.”

Tess didn’t actually believe that county cops would automatically brutalize any black teenager in their custody, not even one accused of an attack on a Valley resident. But she thought the threat would be credible to Lloyd-and it was. He allowed the two women to escort him inside, where Whitney produced a length of rope.

“What’s that for?” Tess asked.

“To tie him up. He doesn’t have the best record for staying put.”

“Fuck you.” Lloyd spit on the floor and started to writhe in Tess’s grasp. Whitney dropped the rope and grabbed his other arm.

“Look,” Tess said, forcing Lloyd to make eye contact. “We’ll give you a chance to sit and talk to us. If you run, we call the police. It’s that simple. The driveway is a mile long, Lloyd. By the time you get to the end, a squad car will be waiting for you. And if you try to cut across the property, you’ll find that picturesque fence is electrified.”

He considered her offer.

“I’m hungry,” he said at last. “You got any food or soda?” Then, as a hasty afterthought, as if remembering the chipotle muffins that had so distressed him: “I mean normal food.”

“Well, there are several bags of those cookies, although they’re now broken into pieces,” Whitney said. “Other than that, I think I have some olives. And maybe some gin.”

Lloyd settled for a glass of tap water and a bag of the shattered lemon cookies.

“When you were at my house, you saw a photograph of Gregory Youssef,” Tess began.

“Who?” He wasn’t very good at faking ignorance-or masking the nervousness that the name always seemed to inspire in him.

“Don’t be coy, Lloyd. Youssef is the federal prosecutor who was killed the night before Thanksgiving. You knew that a federal prosecutor had been killed, because the dealers in your neighborhood were pulled in for questioning. You knew Gregory Youssef’s name. But the two weren’t linked in your mind. Who was Gregory Youssef to you?”

“Never met the man.”

He seemed sincere, but Tess had already observed that Lloyd had a knack for technical truths that sidestepped larger ones.

“How do you know his name, then? And why do you try to avoid the subject when it comes up? Are you scared?”

“I ain’t likely to be scared of you.”

“Not of me. But definitely of someone, something. Someone who can link you to Gregory Youssef. And perhaps indirectly to his murder.”

Lloyd finished a bag of lemon cookies and started in on the chocolate chip ones. Tess couldn’t help envying his metabolism. She had once been able to eat that way, but that had been on the other side of thirty.

“I didn’t know anything about no murder,” he said. “Not a bit of it. All I was told is there was a guy and he’d crossed some folks, and they were going to scare him a little, take his money to show that they could, that he was a fool to think he was a player. Guy gave me the card and the code, told me when to use it and where.”

“A guy?”

“I ain’t naming names. I don’t know a name to give. He was just some guy, an associate of a man I know.”

Tess didn’t believe Lloyd, but she let it go. “What about the security camera? Didn’t you realize you’d show up on it?”

“I wore a hoodie pulled up tight so hardly any of my face showed.” He demonstrated with his hands, cupping them around his face so only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible. “My North Face jacket was over it, but it got stole that very night. Which is why…well, that and the fact that I didn’t get no money…”

“You’re losing me, Lloyd. Take it step by step, minute by minute. When did you get the card?”

“Around eleven that night. Near Patterson Park.”

“And who gave it to you?”

He shook his head. “There were no names. I don’t know his, he don’t know mine.”

“Really?”

“Uh-uh. Just a friend of a friend of a friend.”

“Okay, but he gives you the card and the code, tells you an ATM and a time. Right?”

“Yeah, I was to hit this machine on Eastern Avenue at exactly twelve-thirty A.M. So I did. And I get rolled like fifteen minutes later, guys take my jacket and the cash. And I’m thinking-” He stopped himself. “I’m thinking the guy who hired me done fucked me over, told his boys what he had me do, so he could get the money that was s’pose to be mine. They got my jacket and the cash, but I still had the card in my back pocket. And I was hungry. So I go to an all-night deli, use the card to buy a sub and a bag of chips.”

“The deli had an ATM machine?”

“Just for purchase, but it takes Independence Cards and shit.”

Tess had to fight the urge to tell Lloyd that “and shit” was not equivalent to “et cetera.” Listening to Lloyd was like some hip-hop version of The King and I.

“Does the deli have video surveillance?”

“Don’t think so. Korean’s too cheap. He got a baseball bat instead.”

“Even if he did,” Whitney put in, “he would have reused the tape by now. Most of those places recycle the tapes every twenty-four hours if nothing happens.”

Tess knew this to be true. “What time was this?”

“Like going on two.”

Tess made a note. Youssef’s killer had been tracked by E-ZPass along the I-95 corridor about the same time. Investigators must have noticed that discrepancy-Youssef’s car in the northern reaches of Maryland, perhaps already in Delaware, his ATM card still in Baltimore. By using the card when he did, Lloyd had raised the possibility that there was an accomplice, a key fact the police had managed to hold close.

Tess wondered if Lloyd understood he would be seen as just that-an accomplice. His ignorance of the larger plan would be of no protection to him. He could be turned into a scapegoat, an easy arrest to assure the public that some progress had been made.

“Was that the last time you used the card?”

“Yeah, that was it. For food.”

“Was it the last time you used the card for anything?”

Lloyd extended his feet sheepishly, showing off his whiter-than-white Nikes. “I figured I deserved a pair of new shoes and a jacket, to make up for the one that got stole. I went to the Downtown Locker Room at Towson Town Mall on Friday. Then I cut the card up and threw it in the sewer, like I was s’pose to do in the first place. I didn’t see how anyone could mind. I was just trying to stay even.”

“The person who gave you the card, Lloyd-did he kill Youssef? Would he have known that was the plan?”

“I dunno. He didn’t look it.”

“How did he look?”

“Just like, I dunno. Like a guy.”

“Still, this stranger asked you to use an ATM card at a certain time and place. To use it just once, then throw it away. You noticed the name and you memorized the code-you still know the code, by the way?”

“Two-four-one-one,” he shot back. Another detail that would matter, another detail that only a very small circle of people could know.

“Here’s the thing I don’t get, Lloyd. How did it escape your notice that the name on the card was the same as the name of the man who was killed that night?”

He shrugged. “Don’t follow that news shit unless it’s, like, a good chase or something. Everybody kept talking about the lawyer that got killed, but no one was saying his name, you know? And this guy, he had said what we were doing was no big thing. He said they were just going to teach a guy a lesson, fuck with him a little.”

“You ever see him again?”

“Naw.”

Tess glanced over at Whitney, who had been taking notes on a cocktail napkin, which must have been the closest thing at hand. She held up the monogrammed scrap so Tess could see what she had written:

Hoodie pulled tight

Deli at 2 a.m.

Downtown Locker Room two days later.

Nikes and a new North Face.

2 4 1 1

“It’s pretty damn specific,” Whitney said. “If it’s all true, everyone’s going to want to talk to him.”

“NO COPS,” Lloyd said. “No cops, no names. Not mine, not nobody’s. You know they’ll lock me up, and I ain’t done shit. They’ll hang a charge on me to get me to talk, but I got nothin’ to say. I done told you what I know. You promised you ain’t gonna make me.”

“I did promise,” Tess said. “And I’ll do my best to keep my word. But will you talk to a reporter if I can guarantee your confidentiality?”

“Will they make my voice sound all funny?”

“Will they-Oh, no. A newspaper reporter. Not television.”

This seemed to disappoint Lloyd, but he nodded.

“I don’t get it,” Whitney said. “So he had the card. So some stranger who claimed he had a grudge against Youssef gave it to Lloyd and asked him to use it at a certain time and throw it away. What does that really establish?”

Lloyd also looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t see how he fit into this larger story.

“I’m not sure,” Tess said. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to make it appear that Gregory Youssef was the victim of a certain kind of crime, something personal and a little tawdry. Something that would make everyone squeamish. But if this can be traced back to a local drug dealer, then Youssef’s death actually could have been a consequence of his job after all.”

“I didn’t say anything ’bout a drug dealer,” Lloyd said, but the denial rang hollow to Tess.

“So what do we do?” Whitney asked. “Call the cops?”

“NO COPS!” Lloyd roared.

“No, no cops,” Tess said. “But if Lloyd tells the Beacon-Light everything he knows, the cops will get the information just the same.”

It also would smooth over her own relationship to the newspaper and make amends to Feeney. As his friend, she had tainted him a little with that outburst the other day. This would put them back to even, or closer to it. And she had a hunch that Feeney would agree with her that Marcy Appleton deserved this juicy plum of a story. She was the federal courts reporter.

“We won’t even risk going down to the newspaper. We’ll make the newspaper come to us. Tonight, in fact. And then we’ll be out of your hair for good, Lloyd.”

“Better be some dinner involved,” he said. “Real food, too. Not that weird shit.”

“Whatever you want. Chicken box? Sub? Pizza? Burgers?”

“Yes,” Lloyd said.

GOOD FRIDAY INTO BAD SUNDAY
11

Even if Marcy Appleton had been able to meet all her editors’ various directives and second guesses in one day of reporting, Tess had always assumed that the Beacon-Light would hold Lloyd’s story for the Sunday edition, when it would make the biggest splash. Besides, it had taken most of Thursday and then Friday morning for Marcy to play the time-honored reporting game of “Would I Be Wrong If?” So would I be wrong if I wrote that the ATM card was used at these locations? Am I right about the code? I won’t print it, but would I be wrong if I said the Beacon-Light has a source who knows the code? Would I be wrong if I said the videotape showed someone in a hoodie and a North Face jacket?

The multilingual, smoothly confident Marcy had started with the Howard County detectives. While the suburban county had its pockets of bad neighborhoods, it was overall a blandly peaceful place. Great for kids, as its residents said defensively, but not so great for homicide detectives, whose skills didn’t get much of a workout. Even over the telephone, Marcy picked their bones clean. She then took on the interim U.S. attorney, Gail Schulian, who lost her much-admired cool, revealing in the process just how little she knew about the investigation. Marcy never got flustered, according to Feeney, who kept Tess apprised of the story’s movements-and reiterated his pledge, in each conversation, that Lloyd’s name would never, ever be mentioned, not even inside the newsroom. Reporters at the Blight were now required to reveal anonymous sources to at least one superior. But Feeney counted as a superior, hilarious as Tess found that fact.

“It’s gone,” he told her wearily Friday evening. “We lawyered it this afternoon, and it cleared the copy desk about five minutes ago.”

“Are you their bright and shining star now?”

“More Marcy than me, although she’s been good about sharing credit. She told the bosses that an old source of mine was the go-between. Guess that’s true enough. Only downside is we both have to work Easter Sunday, doing the jerk-off react.”

“Better than covering an Easter-egg hunt or the perennial gang fights that break out in the harbor when everyone goes promenading.”

The bulldog, the early Sunday edition, goes on sale Saturday morning. Tess Monaghan remembered the jargon, if not the reason for it. Something about the bulldog chasing the other editions off the street. But that was simply by virtue of its heft. There was precious little news in the bulldog most weekends. People bought it for the real-estate ads and the coupons, not the stories. However, a big investigative piece, such as Marcy’s article on the new facts in the Youssef case, would be anchored on the front and stay there throughout the run. Only an event of great significance-another 9/11, the death of a world leader-could knock off an exclusive this strong. The Associated Press and the out-of-town papers would start working it immediately, but the Beacon-Light had a head start, while the other news outlets would be trying to find officials willing to pick up their phones over the Easter weekend. The television stations would settle for rip-and-reads, all but reciting Marcy’s story into the camera while standing in front of suitable backdrop-the federal courthouse, the riverbank where Youssef’s body had been found.

Running errands Saturday morning, Tess stopped at her neighborhood coffeehouse, Evergreen, to skim the article. Feeney and Marcy had kept all their promises. Lloyd’s identity was cloaked, and not a single one of his assertions had been shot down. Marcy also had been careful, as Tess had insisted, not to assign Lloyd’s gender. It had made for some awkward writing, with endless repetitions of “the source” and “a person with firsthand knowledge.” Marcy hadn’t even used the name of the store where Lloyd had purchased his jacket and shoes, not that Tess believed that a store clerk could remember who bought a North Face jacket on the day after Thanksgiving. In fact, neither Tess nor Lloyd would have cared if the newspaper had named the Downtown Locker Room, but the Blight’s advertising department had pleaded with the editors to omit that detail.

Satisfied, Tess went about her day, convinced she had done a good deed.

But just as she no longer remembered the rationale behind the name of the bulldog, she had forgotten how much a story could change from bulldog to Sunday final.

In the gym, sweat pouring onto the paper as he pedaled a stationary bike, Gabe Dalesio read the story with a mix of despair and pride. He had been right, he had been onto something, he had been so close. But who would believe him now? He knew that Youssef wasn’t at the wheel of his car when it left the city, and now this story all but proved it. It was an elaborate ruse, an electronic trail meant to conceal Youssef’s real movements. But his brainstorm was moot now. There was no point in being right unless others knew about it. Fuck Collins, for being so dismissive. He probably wouldn’t even remember that Gabe had said anything. The only thing that Collins carried away from that conversation was that Gabe spent a lot of time thinking about getting blow jobs from other guys. Damn it. Damn his own self. He should have told the boss lady what he had figured out.

He wondered how Marcy Appleton had found this anonymous source anyhow. She was a decent reporter, well liked around the courthouse, but better known for her exotic looks than her smarts. A house cat, not a shit disturber. Maybe a defense attorney had acted as matchmaker, offered up his client in hopes of spinning the story. No matter how ignorant the source was of the larger crime, he could still be squeezed as an accomplice. But if it were a matter of trying to protect a client from other charges by giving up valuable information, no seasoned attorney would do that through the media. He would come straight to the prosecutors, put his cards on the table. And if the source didn’t have a potential charge hanging over him, then why talk at all? If the source had been picked up for something else, perhaps by city cops, Gabe could see him making this deal, but there didn’t seem to be anyone official involved. Just the reporter and the source.

Absentmindedly Gabe rose from the bike and grabbed a cup of water.

“You’re supposed to wipe the equipment down,” a middle-aged woman berated him, one of those frightening, pared-to-the-bone types who thought having no body fat was the same as being attractive.

“Sorry,” he said, running his towel over the seat.

“It’s just hygiene,” the dried-up skank said, clearly on a mission to humiliate someone to make herself feel better. “A lot of people ’round here think the rules don’t apply to them, but your sweat’s not nectar, you know? I don’t want to sit on your sweaty seat.”

“Trust me, ma’am, I don’t want that either.” She didn’t get it, just hopped on and began pedaling away, as if she had somebody’s little dog in her basket.

Hell, Gabe’s problem was that he had been too circumspect, too mindful of rules and protocol, wasting opportunity after opportunity. He had planned to make his bones on the Youssef case, but this damn reporter had pulled the rug right out from under him.

Still, might as well drop by the office, see what was buzzing. He could at least get brownie points for showing his face in the middle of what was shaping up to be a real clusterfuck.

Jenkins spent weekends out in West Virginia, in an unassuming built-to-spec A-frame near Berkeley Springs. Inside, it had some nice touches-a plasma television, vast leather chairs, high-end bathrooms, a kitchen with all the extras. The latter had been done with an eye to his ex-wife’s taste, although Betty was long gone before he started building the place. In the back of his mind, he thought she might come back. If not for him, then at least for granite countertops. But Betty found West Virginia even less appealing than Baltimore.

He was settling in for a day of NCAA basketball, brackets and a Sam Adams at his side, when his cell phone rang. It was the fake-o switchboard number that showed up on office calls, and he almost said fuck it-his days of worrying about work 24/7 were long gone. He had done that, and look what it had gotten him. Demoted, humiliated. Still, few work emergencies could be so severe that they would order him back from the mountains, a two-hour trip, so he decided to risk it.

“There’s something in the paper today,” Collins said without preamble. “Someone who used Youssef’s ATM card talked to a reporter. And the Howard County detectives all but verified it. Remember how cagey they were with us? Well, one of the things they were sitting on was some info about the card. Turns out it was used two more times after the initial withdrawal, even as Youssef’s car was heading up the interstate. We knew about the first withdrawal, which matched up with the E-ZPass-northbound car came through the lane at ten forty-five, it was used on Eastern Avenue at eleven-oh-five. So now they know the killer wasn’t the one who used the card, assuming the killer is the one who drove Youssef’s vehicle up 95 to the turnpike.”

“Interesting,” Jenkins said. He liked to be taciturn on the phone, holding his cards as close as any target would. Not because they had any reason to worry about what they said on the phone, just because Jenkins liked discipline for discipline’s sake, and he had taught Collins to do the same. It helped, thinking like the people you were targeting, aping their habits. “Should I come back today, face the music? They let me act as liaison on this because they thought the Howard County cops would be open with me, so I guess I’m in the shitter now.”

“Actually, they’re saying Gail is spitting nails about Howard County, but your name hasn’t come up.”

So Jenkins was so far down on the shit list he wasn’t even worth getting mad at. There were worse things than being invisible, although he couldn’t think of any just now. “Thanks. Who you like in Syracuse-GW?”

“Orangemen versus Colonials? Orangemen. Pussy names, I have to say.”

“Spoken like a true Poet.” Collins had played for the Dunbar Poets, a Baltimore powerhouse that had sent some big players to college and even the NBA.

Jenkins hung up, mourning the loss of what should have been a sweet, relaxed day. He could understand the cops fucking over Gail, but why had they withheld the ATM stuff from him, when all he’d ever done was smile and charm and do his aw-shuckswe’re-all-in-this-together routine? He hadn’t leaked anything. Howard County had let the E-ZPass stuff out, but maybe they had realigned the facts in their mind, decided Jenkins was to blame. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been scapegoated that way. Bastards. They were going to do him again. He just couldn’t win.

Not even in the brackets, as it turned out. By the end of the afternoon, Jenkins was already statistically eliminated from the NCAA pool, which he once ruled. He was losing his touch across the board.

Lloyd spent Saturday the way he normally did, roaming the neighborhood with Dub, looking for financial opportunities, as they liked to call them. He had been taken aback to learn that there was no money to be had from the newspaper. Maybe he should have gone to the cops after all. Cops paid for information. But no, he couldn’t risk that. Once the cops got him, they wouldn’t let him go until he gave them what they wanted, and he had nothing to give. Besides, he had gotten some good food out of it. He had told his story to the man and the lady from the newspaper over a huge meal in that crazy lady’s house, the scary blonde. They had let him have anything he wanted to eat, from anywhere, so he had ordered up a feast-subs and chicken boxes and pizzas, eating from it all as if it were just a big motherfucking buffet, not worrying about what would go wasted, then taking the leftovers away, along with the last two bags of cookies.

He had eaten and talked, talked and eaten, and almost come to enjoy it, the way those people hung on his every word. He was going to help solve a big-ass murder. He was almost inclined to brag on himself to Dub, but then he remembered: If the ATM card was linked to some murder, the murder was almost certainly linked to Bennie Tep, and Lloyd did not want to be crossways with any drug dealers. He’d have to keep it quiet. Still, he had a private thrill when he and Dub stopped in the Korean’s and he saw the front of the newspaper framed in the box on the corner. He leaned closer, reading a few lines, until Dub punched him and asked what he was doing, looking at the newspaper like some old-timer.

They walked across Patterson Park, the fields still muddy. The day was cold and bright, but it held the promise of spring. Lloyd liked spring. People seemed nicer in the days after the cold weather snapped, and it was easier to bum money from the tourists who flocked to downtown. If you got too close to the harbor proper, the cops or the purple people ran you off, but a block or two away, near the parking garages, was just as good. Yes, spring would be great this year, he promised himself. He’d get something going this spring.

Crow worked at the Point all day Saturday and into early Sunday, arriving home at 3:00 A.M. Restless, he prowled the house. Since going to work at her father’s bar, he had tried to keep to Tess’s more normal hours as much as possible, but he just couldn’t throw himself into bed upon coming home, especially when a band like the Wild Magnolias had played. His head still buzzed with the music, and he hummed a few bars of “Smoke My Peace Pipe.” He wished he could get out his own guitar and play, but that would be unfair to the slumbering household. Instead he went into the den, thinking to smoke himself into serenity, but the unicorn box was gone. Oh, Lloyd. Tess wouldn’t miss the dope. A little more law-and-order every year, she seldom smoked anymore and was nervous about Crow’s occasional indulgence. But the box was a recent gift from a little boy named Isaac Rubin, who had purchased it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while on a pilgrimage to visit the location of his favorite book of all times, The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Isaac had given the box to Tess for agreeing to speak to his class on Career Day. The loss of the box would kill Tess, who could be surprisingly sentimental about objects. Maybe Crow could go online, order her another one.

At 5:00 A.M., still wide awake, he heard the thud of the newspaper on the front steps, decided the Beacon-Light would be as good a soporific as dope. He settled in at the dining room table, reading Marcy’s story. He read the same words that everyone else had read in the bulldog edition, except for one key change. Now, in the home edition’s second paragraph, it said, “In a meeting arranged by private investigator Tess Monaghan, the source told Beacon-Light reporters…”

Shit. Crow skimmed the rest of the story. Lloyd was safe, as promised. Marcy and Feeney, covered by state shield laws, couldn’t be compelled to reveal his identity. Even if the feds decided to get involved, it would take months to play out. So they, too, were protected, if only in the short run.

But Tess wasn’t. Neither were Crow and Whitney, if it came to that. Citizens had no shield protection. But Tess was the only one whose name had been served up to the authorities, a fat, juicy target for what were probably some very angry people.

He let her sleep until seven-thirty, then woke her with breakfast. “What’s wrong?” she demanded the moment she saw the tray with fresh pastry and coffee purchased from Evergreen.

She was gone by eight, about an hour ahead of the Howard County detectives, as it turned out.

“Where is she?” asked a freckled, redheaded detective, who brandished his badge as if it could make her reappear magically. “When is she coming back?”

“I have no idea,” Crow said, and it was the absolute truth.