No Good Deeds

SUNDAY
23

“Tess? It’s Whitney. Just FYI-an IRS agent called out of the blue, wants to go over the foundation’s books. Not a problem, but I thought it was awfully coincidental.”

“Hey, hon, it’s Kitty. This man-I didn’t get his name-came by the bookstore late, just before closing. He wanted to talk to me about my arrest outside Supermax, when I was protesting the Thanos execution. He had a photo. Of me, that is. He’s tall, African-American, close-cropped hair, maybe thirty. He would be handsome if he smiled.”

“Tess, it’s your mother-” But that one she answered.

“Hey, Mom. What’s up?” As if Tess didn’t know. She had been getting these calls and messages all weekend.

“Not much. A strange man just rang our doorbell, said we should talk to you about what you were ‘into.’ An FBI agent, very nice, but I let him know in no uncertain terms that I work for NSA and I am not intimidated by such tactics, that he had another think coming if he thought-”

“Great, Mom. Is Dad there? Did they talk to him?’

Her father picked up another extension, but Tess could still hear her mother breathing on the line.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey.”

“So who talked to you?”

“IRS.”

“You worried?”

“Not really.”

Patrick was the world’s most laconic Irishman, but Tess was expert at listening to what he didn’t say, and the anxiety in his silences was chilling. It was one thing to destroy her own life by keeping her promises to Crow and Lloyd. And even Whitney had sort of signed up for this. But her parents hadn’t. She wondered how long it would be until Crow’s parents were called, what insinuating questions would be poured into their ears. That would be unfortunate on many levels. For one thing it would alert them to the fact that their son was missing.

She assured her parents that everything would be fine and hoped it wasn’t a lie. She then called Tyner, told him to be on standby, certain that the three caballeros, as she now thought of them, would come for her again. And, sure enough, Jenkins and Collins arrived just after eleven.

“Back to the courthouse?” she asked, trying for chipper but coming closer to chirpy, her voice high and crackly as a teenage boy’s.

“For now,” Jenkins said. “But don’t be surprised if you end the day in federal lockup.”

“What, you’re going to charge me with a crime?”

“Probably,” Jenkins said, expressionless. Collins simply smiled a terrible smile.

Crow had driven around Salisbury until dawn, but he couldn’t imagine where Lloyd had gone, not in the short term. The kid had probably headed back to Baltimore, catching a ride with someone who lived west of Salisbury, planning to hitchhike the rest of the way. Scared for his life just five days ago, he was now bored out of his mind and wanted to go home. With someone like Lloyd, boredom trumped mortality. Father Rob had warned Crow about that. It had probably been a plan, using the club as a ruse to get away.

Of course he couldn’t have known, going in, that he and Crow would be separated. But he had seen the opportunity once it presented itself, concocted a plan on the spot. Lloyd was smart that way.

Stupid, too.

At least Crow could go home now. Or would, once he called Tess and told her Lloyd was missing. He hoped that information wouldn’t make her waver in her resolve to protect Lloyd. Then again, if Lloyd was stupid enough to go back to Baltimore, maybe he didn’t deserve their protection anymore.

Thing was, the police couldn’t take care of Lloyd even if the kid would allow it. Wasn’t that why he had come to Crow in the first place? Stupid, self-destructive kid. If he didn’t care about his life, why should Crow?

He took out the new cell phone and dialed Tess’s home phone again. The phone rang twice, then kicked into voice mail, a sign that she was on the other line and ignoring the call-waiting signal. He started to text-message her cell but didn’t think it was a good idea to relay the news about Lloyd in such a fashion. He called the house one more time, just in case. No answer now. Where could Tess be on a Sunday morning? A creature of routine, she should have walked the dogs and grabbed her usual coffee by now. Even with the return of mild weather and the reopening of the boathouse, she never went out on the water on Sunday mornings. She preferred to go at day’s end, in the last hour before sunset, when the light was kind to the eyes and the weekend boat traffic had thinned.

Where could she be? Where could Lloyd be? He thought of mice and men, he thought of Of Mice and Men, he thought of Lennie and the rabbits, and the source for the book’s title. The best-laid plans of mice and men often aft a-gley.

Well, here he was, living large at the goddamn intersection of Aft and A-gley.

Lloyd had slept outside many times, in weather more biting than this, yet he never knew a berth as cold and hard as the field he’d found near what appeared to be a highway. Once the sun came up, it was a little better, and he burrowed down into the narrow groove. A furrow. The word came back to him, unbidden, a lesson from long ago. Furrows and Pilgrims and planting fish heads to make better corn. Satchmo? Sasquatch? Something like that. But as the sounds of traffic grew louder on the road, he decided to get up and get going.

Where, was the only question. Where should he go? Where could he go? The question was complicated by the fact that he had missed the sunrise, so he wasn’t exactly sure which way was east and which way was west. And even once he figured it out, which way would he choose? He was a lot closer to the amusement park than to Baltimore, had to be, but it was hard to imagine he could walk all that way. It had taken Crow almost an hour to drive it.

Baltimore was farther still. But once he got there, at least he would have his life back. No more working for nothing. No more of Crow’s conversation, which just drove him nuts sometimes. He was the talkingest guy, although he did know some interesting stuff. The older guy, Ed, at least he knew how to chill, just sit back and be quiet. He was almost cool, although Crow said he was an ex-cop, which meant he wasn’t cool. It had made Lloyd nervous, being so dependent on a cop, ex or no.

He walked along the road, determined to let someone else decide where he would end up. He’d stick out his thumb and catch a ride, and wherever he went, that’s where he would be. That was as good a way to plan as any. Just let life take you where it goes. Hadn’t that been the way he always lived?

Come to think of it, wasn’t that why his life was so fucked up?

He stumbled along the soft, crumbling shoulder, whipping around when he heard cars approaching, but no one slowed. That didn’t really surprise him, black man with leaves and shit in his hair. What did shock him was the minivan that rolled to a stop next to him, big black woman at the wheel, six kids packed into the two rows of seats, all in churchgoing clothes.

“Where you trying to get to, son?” she asked, her voice all sweetness. The kind tone surprised him more than anything. Somehow he had figured she would yell at him, make a lesson of him for all those kids. Look at this stupid nigger walking down the highway. This is what happens if you don’t go to church regular.

“I…I don’t know.”

“Where your people?”

Where indeed. Who were his people? His mama and Murray? Dub? Not Bennie Tep and his folks, not since they killed Le’andro. Lloyd felt something strange in his throat and his eyes, a stinging sensation. Why did this woman’s gentle voice and manner make him want to cry when he had held his ground through ass whippings? He’d be more comfortable if she were bitching him out. He was used to that tone, at least.

“I been staying over to, like, the boardwalk,” he said.

“In Ocean City?”

“Northa there.” It took him a second, but he pulled the name out. “Fenwick.”

“So why you going the other direction?”

He shrugged, not wanting to admit that he didn’t know where he was going.

“We’re from Dagsboro, but we’re on our way to lunch, up to the Denny’s in Salisbury. You want to come with us?”

“I thought Denny’s was the place that didn’t like black people to eat there,” he said.

“That’s why we go there, every Sunday.” The woman had a single dimple in her left cheek, sharp as a diamond winking in a ring. “We go and we say grace, and I have to say they’re always real nice to us. You’re welcome to come, too, although no soda. And no dessert unless you clean your plate. You gotta play by the same rules as my owns.”

Two little girls on the bench seat in the far back scooted apart, pulling in their full skirts and making room for Lloyd.

“You smell funny,” said one, but not with any real meanness to it.

“Shavonda Grace,” the lady scolded, but her tone was mild. “What are you thinking, talking to our guest that way?”

Guest. He was a guest. Lloyd didn’t remember anyone ever calling him that before.

Wait-Crow had, the first night he’d brought Lloyd to his house. Thing was, Lloyd had been so busy being a thief in his own head, he hadn’t even noticed, or cared, what Crow considered him. If only he hadn’t tried to steal the car, if he had just accepted the kindness for what it was. If he hadn’t stolen the car, then that woman wouldn’t have been so hell-bent on coming after him and he wouldn’t have told them what he knew to get her off his ass and Le’andro wouldn’t have been killed.

He thought he’d been so clever, telling the story the way he did. He had thought he was smart, leaving out those details that complicated things. But it was his own cleverness that had gotten Le’andro killed. Maybe he should have told the whole story from the beginning. But it was his nature to hold back what he could, to squirrel away a little extra.

Besides, if he had told the story in full, the only difference would be that he and Le’andro both would be dead.

“You smell,” Shavonda Grace repeated, but she was giggling.

“You’d smell, too, you spent the night in some got-damn cornfield.”

The children gasped in horror at the mild profanity, but the woman behind the wheel kept her company manners.

“Son-I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Lloyd.”

“Well, Lloyd, we don’t permit bad language, especially if it involves taking the Lord’s name in vain. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that in mind.”

Her manner couldn’t have been sweeter, the same easy tone she had taken with the little girl, but for one moment Lloyd was reminded of every woman, every teacher, every person who had told him what to do, where to go, what to say, and how to say it. He wanted to unleash a string of curses, things that would sear the ears of these little churchgoing prisses, show them just how tough he was. Fuck you. Fuck them. Fuck everybody. Fuck the whole got-damn world, and all the people who think they know what you should be doing and saying and thinking and breathing.

Then his stomach sent up a sad, sour rumble, and Lloyd recognized it for the plea it was. Go to Denny’s. Get a meal. Maybe borrow some bus fare, you lucky. Then you can be as got-damn tough as you want to be. Just take this little kindness, for once.

“Yes’m,” he said, meek as a girl.

“You smell,” Shavonda Grace repeated, giggling behind her hand.

“Yeah, well, at least I don’t-” He was going to say something mean about her dress, her hair, her nose, her ears, whatever he could find, and although she was a pretty thing, there was no shortage of material to work with. There was always something you could find to use against a person, tear her down. But she was just a little girl, and her mother-or aunt or whoever-was doing him a kindness. Besides, he remembered the insults flung at him when he was her age, the way they stuck. He wouldn’t do that to her.

“Don’t what?” Shavonda Grace demanded to know.

“Don’t take up too much room, so you can scoot as far from me as you like and hold your nose. I won’t take no offense.”

Shavonda Grace made a great show of pinching her nose shut and fluttering her eyes, but she didn’t slide one inch away. If anything, she seemed to move a little closer.

24

“February two years ago, you took a loan out for your house,” Gabe said, pushing a photocopy of the mortgage application toward Tess. She didn’t have to see the paper to remember the transaction. She had been almost nauseous after the hour at the title company, stunned by the dollar amounts, the commitment she was making. Thanks to Baltimore ’s real-estate market, she looked brilliant now, but at the time all she could fixate on was the actual cost of a $140,000 loan over thirty years.

“You got me there,” Tess said. “I bought a house.”

“And you made a down payment of twenty percent.”

“Sure. That’s mandatory to avoid private mortgage insurance.”

“Where did you get thirty-five thousand?” Gabe asked.

“I had just closed a case that included a generous reward for information about a long-missing girl.”

“So you made the down payment on your own?”

Were they trying to bring this back to Crow and his mystery money? Tyner looked as mystified as she was. Tess nodded tentatively.

“You didn’t borrow any of the money for the down payment?”

“No.”

“Didn’t take money from your father?”

“My father’s contribution was a gift.”

“Right.” Gabe produced another piece of paper from the file. “And here’s his notarized statement that the money was a gift. Nine thousand nine hundred fifty dollars-just under the limit for taxable gifts under the codes then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And here’s where you swore on the application that no borrowed money was used for the down payment. You remember checking that?”

“I checked a lot of things in the process of buying the house, but sure. As my father’s letter said, it was a gift.”

“But you’ve since made two payments to your father-five thousand dollars year before last, seven thousand last fall.”

Last fall. Tess remembered wistfully how flush she had been.

“I was grateful to my father. He had helped me buy my house. When times were good for me, I wanted to repay the favor.”

“In other words, it was a loan, and you repaid it with interest.”

Tyner ran his fingers through his hair, a sign that he was nervous, but only Tess would know that.

“No,” Tess said. “He gave me a gift. I gave him a gift. It’s like-if my dad gave me a turkey for Christmas and I gave him a ham for Easter.”

“I’m afraid the federal government doesn’t see it that way. Call it turkey, call it ham, but it was a loan, and you lied about it.”

Tess flounced in the hard plastic chair, impatient and out of sorts. They had been trying to scare her with their talk about federal charges, but this was so chickenshit. She thought of the blatantly illegal things she had done as part of her job. Taking confidential documents out of the governor’s trash, for one. And this was the best they could do? Nitpicking over payments from a father to a daughter and back again.

“Fine-” she began, ready to concede the point, but Tyner put a cautionary hand on her arm and interrupted.

“They were gifts,” he said. “It’s our position they were gifts.”

“Well, it’s our position that your client lied on a federal form,” Gabe said. “And we plan to charge her with that.”

Tess rolled her eyes. Jenkins, who had been letting Gabe run the interview, caught her exasperated expression, but it didn’t seem to bother him. The three men were like proud hens sitting on some monstrous egg.

“The penalty for what you’ve done,” Gabe said, “is thirty years in federal prison.”

“Oh, get out,” Tess said. But even as she spoke, she saw Tyner nodding unhappily.

“And your dad has done the same thing. Lie in this notarized statement.” Jenkins held up the letter for Tess’s edification. “So we can go after him, too. And we will, unless you tell us the name of your source. Give it to us and all this will be forgotten. We’ll cut an immunity deal for you and your dad, and this will never come up again.”

Tess felt dizzy, weak-and almost bizarrely grateful. It was going to end now. This had gone too far. Her dad was already unnerved by their inquiries into his business. This would drive him over the edge. But even as she readied herself to break her promise to Lloyd, her brain clicked along, hearing the false note, the sour chirp of illogic, but not being able to pounce on it.

Tyner could, however.

“You’re saying this is an official plea bargain, something Gail Schulian has approved?”

“Well…” Gabe glanced at Jenkins, lost for just a second. It was a fatal mistake. Tyner’s instinct for weakness and ineptness was as sharp and astute as that of anyone Tess had known. She sometimes felt that Tyner had learned to compensate for his physical limitation, the paralysis caused in a car accident almost fifty years ago, by developing a sixth sense that allowed him to discern the tiniest frailty on a cellular level. If you were going to go up against Tyner, not a single mitochondrion could be having an off day.

“Does Gail know about this?” Tyner pressed.

“Gail?”

“Your boss. Gail Schulian. Has she signed off on making an official plea agreement, in which the government agrees never to prosecute Tess for what we’ve yet to affirm is a violation of this federal statute, in return for naming the confidential source in the Youssef case?”

“We don’t take everything to the boss,” Gabe countered, but his optic muscles seemed to have snapped, so his gaze went everywhere around the room, avoiding Tyner’s. “I have the authority to offer this plea.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Tyner said, in a tone that indicated he had no faith in the young man whatsoever. “But given that your boss is an interim U.S. attorney, I think it’s important we involve her in these discussions from the beginning. It would make me feel more comfortable, especially since her replacement could be named at any time. Also-should Tess tell you what you want to know, are you going to share the information with the Howard County detectives? It is their case, after all. Seems odd, the feds expending so many resources on a case they didn’t even want to investigate. Let’s get everyone in the room-this suspiciously bare-bones, under-decorated room-and do this just once.”

Why was Tyner talking about interior decorating now?

“Gregory Youssef was my colleague,” Gabe said. “Of course I care what happened to him.”

“Yes, now that you believe he wasn’t killed by a male prostitute. But when that was the going scenario, this office couldn’t get far away enough from Youssef.”

Gabe gathered up the papers he had spread so lovingly across the desk, straightening and bouncing them ostentatiously in an obvious delaying tactic.

“Your client is guilty of a felony,” he said. “We’re offering you a deal. Take it or leave it.”

“Are you prepared to charge my client?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then do it. Enter the charge and let me get her in front of a federal magistrate, so bond can be set and she can be released. We don’t have to work out a plea today. You think she broke the law? You think you can prove it? Go ahead.”

“There’s no need to be all official-” Jenkins put in.

“Really? I guess that would explain why we keep meeting in an office that the U.S. attorney vacated back in January of this year. Are you that paranoid about your colleagues looking over your shoulder, Mr. Dalesio-or that nervous about the boss finding out about this little freelance investigation?”

“Look, this is just beginning.” Gabe Dalesio’s olive-skinned complexion was now more of an eggplant shade, his forehead perspiring. “I’ve got the paperwork to seize her car today. And to start the process on seizing her house.”

“On what grounds?”

“She told the Howard County police that her source feared for his life because his contact has been killed. Our office has been able to establish that the dead man was Le’andro Watkins, killed last Monday night in a drive-by shooting.”

“I don’t know the contact’s name,” Tess put in. She had gone to great lengths not to know it. “It was never revealed to me, so I can’t verify it one way or another.”

But she did know when he had died, and the timing was right. How had they pinpointed this? How could they be so sure? They must have assumed the murder was subsequent to the newspaper story and examined only those homicides that occurred in that five-day window, from when the story first appeared to her interview with the Howard County cops.

“Le’andro Watkins is a drug dealer,” Jenkins said. “He was part of Bennie Tep’s organization over on the East Side. Low-level, but he was rising up. So if he trusted your friend to do something for him, your friend was probably involved with drug dealing, too.”

“Not my ‘friend,’” Tess said sharply. “And your logic sucks. If Androcles took the thorn from the lion’s paw and the lion turned out to be a drug dealer, would he be vulnerable to these seizure laws?”

“It’s up to a federal grand jury to evaluate our logic,” Jenkins said, long past pretending to play second chair behind the young prosecutor. “We’re going to link you to a dead drug dealer. We’re going to figure out if anyone ever connected with drugs worked out of your house or used your car. We’re going to look into your father and your aunt, see if their businesses are used as fronts for drug money. And all because you insist on protecting someone who’s almost certainly a criminal.”

Tess was speechless, her mouth shut tight in order to combat the instinct that was dying to scream “Lloyd Jupiter” over and over again. She had every right to break the promise. They were probably on the verge of figuring it out themselves. They had identified the dead kid, Le’andro Watkins, with no help from her. With that lead they could definitely flush out the secret to Lloyd’s identity. So why didn’t they do it? Why was it so important for them to get her to tell what she knew? It was childish to think of this as a battle of wills, but this had gotten personal in a way that Tess couldn’t fathom.

“Bring Gail in,” Tyner said, “and we’ll do this properly. Tess is not telling you anything until we have her promise that all of this goes away. Forever. And we’re going to want some assurances about the rest of her family as well.”

“Your wife,” Mike Collins said, making the commonplace word sound uncommonly rude, and Tess knew that Tyner longed to strike him for insulting Kitty.

Instead he said, “Everyone. Tess, her father, her aunt, her boyfriend, her friend Whitney.”

“We don’t offer blanket immunity for life-” Gabe began, but Jenkins’s voice rose over his. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Is she free to go?”

“Sure.” Jenkins paused in the doorway. “We never have any problem finding her, do we?”

The trio left them alone in the room. It was only then that Tess noticed how odd she felt. Her face was flushed, feverish, as if she were a kid with a guilty conscience called to the principal’s office. Her hands and feet were ice cold, as if no blood were getting to them, yet her palms were sweating, too.

But it was Tyner’s hand, placed gently on her shoulder, that worried her the most. She must be in a lot of trouble if Tyner was being so kind to her.

“The thing about the office-how did you figure that out?” A trivial question, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to form the more central one.

“I had thought the surroundings pretty bloodless, even by government standards. On a hunch I called a friend who does a lot of federal bankruptcy work, and he confirmed that they relocated across the street.”

“Am I…could they…I mean, shit, thirty years. How can that be?”

“The prosecutor’s not particularly bright,” Tyner said. “And he clearly jumped on this hobby horse without getting Gail’s say-so. But I think she’ll take his side and they’ll charge you. That max really is thirty years. They use it all the time to squeeze people they can’t get on anything else.”

“We could go to the press…” She must be desperate if she was considering trying to manipulate the local media.

“Thing is, I don’t think we can win this public-relations war. The average citizen sees it their way-you’re protecting a person of interest in the murder of a federal prosecutor. And if it drags on even a little while, the cost of defending yourself would be exorbitant. You’d have to hire someone else, for one thing, someone with more expertise in the federal system-a system in which more than ninety percent of all cases plead out, because more than ninety-five percent of the people who go to trial are found guilty.”

“Maybe I could borrow some money from Crow,” she said. “Crow, with his secret money-market account. I still don’t know what to make of that. I don’t know what to make of any of this. And I’ve been terrified to speak to him on the phone, for fear he’ll tell me something that these guys will ask about and then I’ll be at risk for lying and incurring more federal charges.”

Tyner gave her shoulder another squeeze. She turned away from him, and using the wheeled chair to motor across the floor, like a toddler astride a Big Wheel, she rolled to the trash can in the corner and threw up.

25

The afternoon was gray and overcast, a perfect complement to Crow’s mood. Yet he kept postponing his departure, finding another chore to do for Ed, another errand to run. He dropped the Books on Tape in the library’s off-hour boxes. He and Lloyd would never listen to Early Autumn now. On the way back to FunWorld, he stopped at Ed’s trailer park and found the older man sitting on the screened-porch annex to his motor home, wearing shorts and clutching a beer.

“It’s Opening Day,” Ed said. “And on Opening Day I sit on my porch in shorts and drink beer.”

“I thought there was only one game and it’s tonight on ESPN, the Red Sox at the Yankees. Everyone else plays Tuesday.”

“Tradition,” Ed said. “You find the boy?”

Crow winced a little at the “boy” part, conscious of how it would land on Lloyd if he were here. Then again, Lloyd was a very young sixteen. Maybe not a boy, but boyish, as evidenced by his disappearing act.

“No,” he said. “And he doesn’t know how to call me, because I switched burners last night, dumping the other phone. I suppose he could try to call FunWorld if he knew the number, or get your listing from directory assistance. But why would he call? He clearly wanted to get away.”

“You know I was a cop, right?”

“Yeah. A cop, but also a friend of Spike’s. You held his liquor license, in fact. What was that about?”

“Spike has a past. The kind of past that keeps you from having a liquor license. Not even his family knows about it. He was…a little out of control as a young man. I locked him up.”

“You locked him up, but then you helped him get a liquor license when he got out?”

“What he did-Look, it’s not my story to tell. One day you’ll have a past and you’ll want people to keep it to themselves. Trust me.”

“I already have a few mysteries in my life,” Crow said.

Ed snorted, as if Crow didn’t know from secrets, and he had a point. Most people would think that Crow’s secret was a cause for joy and celebration, but Crow felt marked by it, shamed and unsure. “Anyway, let’s just say I could see the bigger picture, see that maybe Spike didn’t have any choices in what he did. So when he did his time and wanted a fresh start, I helped him out.”

“What’s your point?”

“I don’t know. I kind of lost it.” He scratched a pale, freckled calf. “Oh, yeah. Like I said, I was a cop. The boy?”

“Lloyd.”

“Yeah, him. He’s hiding something, too.”

“He was in hiding because he had stopped hiding something.”

“I get the distinction, but that’s what I’m telling you. He ain’t told you everything he knows. That’s why he’s so jumpy-like. There’s another shoe going to drop with him. Maybe you’re better off, not being around him. Someone wants to kill the kid, you’re trying to protect him, and he’s not straight with you. That means he’s risking your life along with his.”

Crow wanted to indulge the older man, but he didn’t think a retired cop’s instincts were worth much.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know. I don’t think I’ll ever see Lloyd Jupiter again.”

“You want a beer?”

Ed was drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, which had enjoyed a brief, strange vogue among the wannabe hipsters that came to the Point. Crow was pretty sure, however, that Ed had been drinking PBR since before those kids were born and would still be drinking it after some of them died.

“Sure.”

They sat in companionable silence, pretending the day was suitably warm and sunny, and listened to the callers on WBAL, whose signal was faint but clear here on the shore. It was the happiest, most optimistic day of the baseball season, with the Orioles fans convinced that they were going to go 162-0. Hey, it could happen. Anything could happen.

Tess dug the cell phone out of her laundry hamper and called the only number on the message list. No answer. How else could she get in touch with Crow? She examined the phone, which had more bells and whistles than hers-pictures, video, Internet access. She could e-mail him, then. She went to her computer and sent Crow a message headed SIX INCHES FOR YOU, a long-standing joke with them.

Call me. Urgent.

All she could do was hope he would check the e-mail via phone-he was clearly too canny to use a computer that could be traced. Oh, she had raised her little spy boy well. Spy boy made her think of flag boys, and she put on a CD of the New Orleans music that Crow loved so much-and kept booking into the club, despite mixed results. “Jockamo fee-NO-MONEY,” her father had complained privately to her.

My flag boy told your flag boy…

She should forward those photos that Whitney had taken of the three caballeros, she decided, although if that trio got close enough for Crow to identify, it would be too late. But at least he would recognize his hunters should they come for him, understand how serious things were. Not that it mattered. Tyner figured she had perhaps seventy-two hours before she would be charged officially and faced with the choice of giving up Lloyd Jupiter or rolling the dice on the federal charge. Of course, once she identified Lloyd, they would still have to find him, and she couldn’t help them with that. Would they believe her? Or would they deny her the promised immunity, thinking she had reneged?

As for Crow’s disappointment when she caved-well, who was Crow to be disappointed with her? Crow, who had listened to her fret about money while he sat on his secret nest egg. She didn’t believe that Crow would be involved in anything illegal, but then-she had never thought he would be cruel or selfish either. He had been playing poor. She really was.

Tess downloaded the three photos, then sent them as e-mail attachments. The nausea came back, and she couldn’t think of anything to do except to lie on the floor, although what she really needed to do was put something, anything, in her stomach. The dogs came over and comforted her, pressing their damp, cold noses to her neck and ears. She was touched-until she realized they were simply petitioning her to take them for their afternoon walks. Man’s best friend, sure, as long as your interests were congruent with theirs.

Her restless, association-prone mind leapfrogged back to the motto she had invoked the first time the happy trio had come for her. It was one beloved by her father, a longtime public servant. What’s the most frightening sentence in the English language? he would ask her when his friends came over. Other kids did the itsy-bitsy spider, but this was Tess’s shtick.

She’d lisp back, We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

Her father’s friends, most of them employed by the city and state and feds, would laugh until they were bent double.

Jenkins was so frustrated that he didn’t trust himself to speak. Dalesio was an inept asshole. If Jenkins had controlled the interview from the start…ut he hadn’t wanted to do that. He needed that stubborn bitch to focus on Gabe, wanted her to see him as the enemy. Thing is, good cop-bad cop worked only when the bad cop was good at being the bad cop. He should have left Gabe out of it, worked this exclusively with Bully. But the DEA agent was a little too good at playing bad cop. Plus, verbal wasn’t Bully’s strength. Poor guy. He’d never really found his niche after they had taken him out of the undercover unit.

No, the kid had folded, weak and ineffectual. Jenkins had told him repeatedly that they needed to extract the information now, that it was imperative to get her to give it up without going for the actual charge. They didn’t want to do this in public. Her lawyer would certainly leak details of an official deal, if only to embarrass them. Sure, Schulian would go for charging Monaghan; she was furious about the way the Youssef case had played out in the press. She’d be happy to throw the full weight of her office toward obtaining the lead. Hell, she might even be proud of Gabe Dalesio, which was all he really cared about, his own career and standing. But then there would be too many players, too many people in the loop. This asshole kept ignoring Jenkins’s admonition to keep this close, among the three of them.

“There are some other leads in the paperwork,” Gabe was burbling now, not getting how badly he had screwed up-or else covering for his embarrassment. They had gone for a late lunch at a steak house in the harbor, where the misty weather had held down the usual weekend crowds, and while the place wasn’t bad, it made Jenkins wistful for the joints he’d known in New York. Keane’s, Peter Luger’s. The New York office was considered a bum assignment by most of the agents, but it was the only place Jenkins had wanted to be, and it had outstripped his fantasies. The best way to live in New York was to be rich, of course, but there was a second way to do it-having a job that encouraged people to shower you with perks. Access to restaurants and clubs, forgiving owners who let you slide on checks because you were FBI, you were keeping the city safe.

Even with those hidden bonuses, it had been a stretch, living-and dressing-to the heights he desired on his government salary. And Betty had been expensive, surprisingly so. She’d been a waitress when they met, making jewelry on the side, seemingly down-to-earth and low-maintenance. But once he was disentangled from his wife and family, Betty’s needs grew and grew.

Then it had all gone to shit in a way he could never imagine. A tip had come into the Bureau about a possible terrorism suspect, a dark-skinned man photographing bridges around New York on a curiously regular schedule, almost like clockwork. Who wouldn’t have jumped on the guy, brought him in, hammered away at him? He was a young Egyptian, a college student allegedly, and he claimed he was taking the digital photos for a school project, but Columbia University had never heard of him.

Turned out the kid went to Columbia College, in Chicago. He was in New York on spring break. Oh, and he was a Christian, too, not a Muslim. Jenkins might have ridden out the private embarrassment of it all, but then the media had gotten it. Once it was public, someone had to take the fall. The Bureau couldn’t blame Barry for the investigation itself, which had been totally by the book, but they found a way to discredit him. They started going over his expense reports, questioning every line item. In the end they never found enough to fire him, but they found enough irregularities and missing documentation to send him back to a make-work job in Baltimore. To add insult to injury, his new colleagues treated him like a short-timer, a man of no worth. He was given bullshit duties, things that didn’t use 30 percent of his brain. At his lowest he had thought of putting a gun in his mouth a couple of times, but then he met Bully, who’d been even more thoroughly screwed by his bosses-but wasn’t so defeated by it. Bully’s fury had stoked his own, gotten him to take his tail out from between his legs and reclaim himself.

“There’s the articles of incorporation for her business-”

The dumb shit was still babbling. Figured. Guy had wilted in front of the old cripple, but now he couldn’t shut up. Collins hadn’t said a word since he placed his order. Jenkins loved that about Collins, the way he didn’t talk unless he had something to say.

“Look, we have what we need,” Jenkins said, cutting the kid off. “Don’t get carried away.”

“I’m just saying that there’s still more ways to get at her.”

“We had her,” Jenkins said. “The point was trying to get her to tell us today, to keep this from turning into some huge public deal. That’s why I told you not to go after the reporters, because that would have been all over the newspapers the minute you even questioned them.”

“Well, what about the information that Bully developed?” Collins frowned at Gabe’s use of his nickname, but the kid was too insensitive to notice. “What do we know about the dead kid, Le’andro, his known associates? Why not jack up Bennie Tep, lean on him?”

“Brilliant,” Collins said, and Gabe beamed, not hearing the sarcasm.

“We go to Bennie, we alert him that we know he’s involved,” Jenkins said. He was no longer trying to disguise his exasperation. In fact, he was amping it up, hoping that the kid would finally understand how badly he had screwed up. “He’ll kill half of East Baltimore rather than risk being linked to the murder of a federal prosecutor.”

“But he’s such a small-timer in the scheme of things, and you said he’s always tried to avoid violence-”

“He’s small by design. Like a boutique, you know? He keeps his business close in order to reduce risk. He doesn’t like to kill, but he will if he has to.”

“Oh,” Gabe said, getting it at last, or seeming to. “Well, there’s nothing hard and fast about the timeline. We can wait to bring her back in. If anything, it will probably make her even jumpier. Sword of Damocles and all that.”

“Sword of damn what?” Jenkins asked. He was a college boy, too, but that one got by him.

“He was a man who sat under a sword, hanging by a thread,” Collins said. Gabe, the poor sap, couldn’t hide how impressed he was. Bad form. Bully wouldn’t forgive him that.

“You learn that in college?” Gabe asked.

“High school. Dunbar.”

“Right-you were a Poet.” Fuck, the kid was teasing Bully now, making “poet” sound like “faggot.” But Collins wouldn’t even waste a look on the guy.

Crow’s body was completely disoriented. He had stayed up until 3:00 A.M., which was the new 4:00 A.M., then gotten up at the new 10:00 A.M., which was the old 9:00 A.M. Drinking three PBRs on a practically empty stomach hadn’t helped matters much. He should probably grab a meal before heading back. Or maybe stay here, get a good night’s sleep, rather than risk nodding off at the wheel. Was he honoring his body’s needs or postponing the reunion with Tess, who would be full of questions he couldn’t answer? He felt foolish, running away to protect Lloyd only to lose him in a Salisbury nightclub. Some protector he’d turned out to be.

A dusty gray minivan was idling in one of the spaces on the side street along FunWorld. For one stupid, panicky moment, Crow worried that the authorities had caught up with him. But he was pretty sure no law-enforcement agency used minivans.

“Mr. Crow?” a woman called from the car.

“Just Crow,” a familiar voice corrected. “He’s not a mister.”

“I found Lloyd hitchhiking this morning, and he said he lived here. But I didn’t want to leave him until I saw a grown-up.” The driver, a full-faced black woman with a serious Sunday hat-a tall, golden straw concoction that deserved to be called a crown-looked him up and down. “I guess you count.”

The side door slid open, and Lloyd climbed out of the minivan, at once sheepish and defiant. “Where were you last night, man? You left me.”

“I left-” But Crow saw that insisting on this technical point might cost him something larger. “I’m sorry. I went to buy new cell phones. It didn’t occur to me that you would be looking for me before closing.”

“We fed him a good lunch,” the woman said. “My, he does have an appetite.”

“And he smells!” a little girl’s voice called from within the depths of the minivan, provoking peals of childish laughter. Crow thought the insult would throw Lloyd into his worst defensive posture, that he might ball up his fists or say something inexcusably obscene. But he just mock-scowled and said, “Not as bad as you, Shavonda Grace,” which earned another round of delighted giggles.

“Looks like you made some friends,” Crow said after the woman at the wheel-Mrs. Anderson, he had learned, of Dagsboro-made a three-point turn and headed back to the highway.

“Naw. More like acquaintances.”

“Acquaintances can become friends.”

“If you say so.”

Did Lloyd mean to imply that Crow was more acquaintance than friend? It didn’t matter. His actions undercut his cruel adolescent words. He had come back here. On his own, free to choose, he had directed Mrs. Anderson to bring him here. Perhaps he trusted Crow after all.

MONDAY
26

Tess woke up about 7:00 A.M., her head fogged from restless dreams. They hadn’t been real dreams, more a state between consciousness and unconsciousness in which her mind was stuck in a single groove, like a car spinning its tires in the sand. Crow’s secret account, Crow’s secret account, Crow’s secret account. The fact nagged at her not only in its own right but because it was pointing her somewhere else. She did the only thing she knew to clear her head, the thing she would have done anyway on any weekday morning from mid-March to Thanksgiving. She went to the boathouse.

Unlike the college crews and the local rowing club, a self-employed and solitary sculler such as Tess had the luxury of going out a little later, which allowed her to avoid the traffic jams during the peak times on the rickety docks. And while the middle branch of the Patapsco was far from pastoral, it provided the serenity and isolation she needed to think. Or not think, as the case might be. Here her brain could empty itself, sit still while her body did all the thinking. Tess had tried many things to reach that in-the-moment state that some call Zen-yoga, wine, bad television. But it was only on the water that her busy mind surrendered.

Tess’s body was pretty smart, as it turned out. Today her leg and arm and back muscles went through their paces with great gusto. By the time she was heading to the dock in a nonstop power piece, she had the detail that had been nagging at her.

Tess wasn’t the only woman who shared her life with a man who had a secret account. Gregory Youssef had left behind a safe-deposit box. Was there something to that? Should she try to persuade Wilma to open it before Tess gave up Lloyd?

Her mind moved in time with the oars, thinking of other things she could do before she had to knuckle under to the feds. They had identified the young man, Le’andro Watkins, killed in Lloyd’s stead but didn’t seem interested in pursuing that lead. Tess could follow and even endorse that logic. Such an inquiry might end up alerting the killer that he had missed the real target, which could make Lloyd all the more vulnerable. The only thing Lloyd had going for him right now was that Youssef’s killer assumed he was dead. That and the fact that only five people-Tess, Crow, Whitney, Feeney, and Marcy-knew who Lloyd was.

Or was that six? This thought came to her as she was running the hose over her shell. There was at least one other person Lloyd trusted to the extent that they shared a scam and split the cash. Tess might not know the boy’s name or whereabouts, but she did know what he looked like and how he might be found. She would locate him first, then surprise Wilma in her lair, much as Wilma had caught Tess off guard in a place where she had expected to be free from questioning.

After another morning of painting, Crow and Lloyd used their lunch break to go to the library, check out the Books on Tape that Crow had returned just yesterday, already back in circulation at this small and efficient branch. Crow seized the opportunity to check the Internet as well, curious in spite of himself to read the accounts of Opening Day. Given his mother’s Boston roots, he had been raised a Red Sox fan. It was, he reflected now, excellent preparation for being in a relationship with Tess-frustrating, infuriating, heartbreaking, exhilarating. But the Sox had persevered.

After a mere eighty-seven years, a voice in his head reminded him as he closed the computer’s browser.

He and Lloyd continued to the FedEx box, dropping Tess’s new phone in the mail to her. It would arrive tomorrow morning, and Crow could call her then.

And tell her what? The long-term flaws in his plan became more apparent every day. Lloyd still didn’t want to go back to Baltimore if it meant talking to authorities. When Crow had fled with him, he’d hoped there might be another break in the case, making Lloyd a moot topic. He saw now that an arrest in Youssef’s murder wouldn’t make Lloyd any less interesting to the various law-enforcement types. If someone was charged, Lloyd would still be expected to testify-and still face the street justice meted out to those who cooperated with the police. Crow had been naïve to think that time would buy Lloyd anything but more grief.

He found himself wishing that Tess were here to argue with him, boss him, tell him to do things differently. But for once he was on his own, without Tess second-guessing him.

Funny, it was what he had always thought he wanted.

When it came to his house, his car, and himself, Gabe Dalesio was neither neat nor messy. He sometimes went too long without a haircut or didn’t notice his shoes needed a shine. The remains of his latest Starbucks Americano often sloshed around for days in his Acura’s cup holder. But where his actual work was concerned, he had systems upon systems upon systems. One of his trademarks, as he thought of it, was his use of a sketchbook, the largest one he could find, and a set of color-coded pens and Post-its. He had first started using this method when he was tracking money in drug and RICO cases. But now he deployed his colored pens in an attempt to figure out how everyone in Tess Monaghan’s life interacted-and to gain back Jenkins’s faith and trust. Look for the person or place with the most overlaps, Gabe decided, and he could figure out where they had stashed the source.

The boyfriend should be the key. He worked for Patrick Monaghan, and his sudden absence was simply too convenient. Plus, he had a pocketful of cash, based on the deposit slip for the hundred and fifty thou, which meant he could go for days without using an ATM or a credit card. Gabe wished he could get a wiretap for the Monaghan telephone, but he knew he couldn’t meet the standard, not yet. Down the road, maybe, but Jenkins didn’t have the patience for such maneuvers. Gabe riffled his papers, looking for the yellow Post-its. Yellow-the color for cowards-was the boyfriend.

The boyfriend’s family was dull, which is to say that they were everything they appeared to be, a university professor and a sculptor, living the proper academia-social life in Charlottesville. Where had their son gotten his money, then? Tax filings should provide leads, but those weren’t due for another two weeks. What would Gabe do if he had a pile of cash like that? Just what he was doing, he realized. He loved his job.

The Monaghans and the Weinsteins, now, they were more promising. Steeped in local politics, and local politics always had a nut of corruption. Clearly, the more he leaned on her father, the more they got to her. That was when she had wavered in the interview, when they threatened her father. The Monaghans were green, the Weinsteins were purple. There had to be something to play with in those two worlds.

He hadn’t missed Jenkins’s exasperation and disappointment yesterday. Gabe was just self-aware enough to realize how clueless Jenkins and Collins thought he was. He knew that they blamed him for screwing up this latest round. But what could he do, once the old guy sussed out that they were taking an unauthorized flier on this?

The yellow path wasn’t leading him anywhere. But he had put a pink Post-it on the liquor license, the Monaghan bitch’s color. Why had he flagged this anyway? She wasn’t listed anywhere on the license, and she didn’t appear to have anything to do with her father’s business. The liquor license had been passed from Ed Keyes to Patrick Monaghan, so green was the only flag that should be flying here.

Keyes. That was the name of her detective agency. Keyes Investigations, Inc. He had thought it was some stupid local reference, as in Francis Scott Key, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was the name of the owner. Yes, there it was on the corporation papers. Keyes. Keyes. Key!

He crumpled a paper cup, the only nonessential piece of paper in his office, and sent it sailing into his wastebasket. It bounced off the rim, teetered, then fell in. Gabe Dalesio. He shoots, he scores.

Tess called Health Care for the Homeless, figuring the agency would have a ready list of the soup kitchens open on Mondays. There were fewer than ten, led by Our Daily Bread. The huge soup kitchen in the heart of downtown served every day, with almost a thousand people passing through its line. But she had a hunch that the young man she was searching for would stick closer to home. There was a small church-run program over on the East Side, which started serving at three to accommodate schoolkids. Lloyd hadn’t gone to school, but his friend might. And it was over in that part of town, on a Monday, that Crow had met Lloyd.

Holy Redeemer’s director didn’t bother masking her hostility to Tess and her mission. “Our kitchen is a haven,” said Charlotte Curtis, a short, compact black woman with graying braids. “I don’t want any of our guests to feel as if we’ve betrayed them. It’s part of the reason I don’t take federal or state money. I don’t want anyone thinking they have a right to my records.”

“I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble,” Tess said. “Sort of the opposite. I’ve been trying to help a kid named Lloyd Jupiter.”

It felt strange to say his name, given how fiercely she had concentrated on not saying it for the past week. But this woman was so protective of her clients that Tess couldn’t imagine her cooperating with the authorities.

“I know Lloyd,” Charlotte Curtis said, her voice ever so cautious. “He’s a sweet kid, underneath it all.”

“And is there another kid he hangs with, round, a little heavyset, but very quick and light on his feet?” Tess still remembered how speedily and casually the boy had moved after piercing Whitney’s tire.

“Dub.”

“Dub?” Tess was thrown by the name’s redneck vibe.

“Short for Dubnium, an element. His mother liked chemistry when she was in high school.” Charlotte Curtis sighed. “Unfortunately, his mother likes chemicals, too. She’s in the wind. But Dub is some kind of genius. Seriously. He’s not only doing well in school, he’s managing to evade the Department of Social Services, which is determined to put him and his siblings in foster care and collect his mother’s public assistance before she can get to it. No one can find Dub if he doesn’t want to be found.”

The warning registered only as a challenge to Tess. “No one official,” she countered. “But you can, can’t you? I bet you know where he is.”

“If I knew where he lived, I’d be obligated to do something about it, wouldn’t I?”

“Would you? Do you believe that Dub would be better off in DSS custody?”

Tess felt Charlotte Curtis taking her measure, putting her on some metaphysical scale that weighed and evaluated every bit of her-brain, heart, soul. The woman said at last, “I can’t swear to where he is. He moves a lot. Last I heard, they had a place over on Collington. Look for a red tag on the lower portion of the plywood that covers the door.”

“Tag?”

“Graffiti mark. Dub has an open-door policy for other kids who need a place to stay, Lloyd among them. But he doesn’t give out the address, just the block, because he and his mother are always tussling over the benefits. Dub gets the card, she reports it stolen, he changes the PIN code somehow, has the replacement card sent to him care of…Well, let’s just say he has a regular address he can use. High school is easy for Dub after five years of trying to outthink his mother.”

Tess got to the rowhouse on Collington before school was out, giving her time to explore it. The house was boarded up, with No Trespassing signs stapled to the wooden surfaces, but there was a red squiggle in the lower-right-hand corner, and the plywood over the door swung open easily.

Her stomach lurched a little at the conditions inside-pallets on the floor, no running water, dim even in the afternoon because of the boarded-over windows. Even as a flophouse, it was far from adequate. Charlotte had confided in Tess that the church allowed Dub and his siblings to use their bathroom in the mornings, and the children then relied on the facilities in the branch library the rest of the time. In fact, that was where they spent each afternoon throughout the cold-weather months. Would they stay outside, now that dusk came later and the air was almost warm? Tess waited in her car, certain she would recognize him by his walk.

Not long after five, Tess saw a trio coming down the block, a heavyset teenager and two younger children. Yes, that was the silhouette she remembered, the same light-footed Jackie Gleason grace. She waited until they slipped into the house, then followed about five minutes later.

“Shit,” Dub said.

“I’m not DSS,” Tess assured him. “Just a friend of Lloyd Jupiter’s. He’s in trouble.”

“Don’t know any Lloyd.”

“So it’s just a coincidence that you puncture tires and Lloyd comes along five minutes later, ready to change them?”

Dub didn’t make the mistake of speaking when surprised.

“I saw you, Dub. Week before last. You and Lloyd pulled the scam over on Mount Street. Old Mercedes station wagon. Only Lloyd didn’t show up for a while, did he? And when he did, I bet he had a story about how he didn’t make any money, but he had bags of cookies, maybe some leftover carryout. Am I right?”

“Them cookies were good,” the little girl said wistfully. She looked about eight, and she wore her hair in a timeless style-three poufy plaits, sectioned off as precisely as city blocks, fastened with plastic barrettes at the ends. Tess marveled at the care that had been taken with the little girl’s hair. The boy, slightly taller, was spick-and-span as well, although his trousers were a tad too short. She hoped kids no longer got teased for wearing high-waters.

“I haven’t seen Lloyd for a while,” Dub said. “I don’t know where he is.”

“That makes two of us. But did he come to you after Le’andro Watkins was killed? Did he tell you he feared for his life?”

Dub felt in the pocket of his jacket and took out three limp bills, dollars that looked as if they had been dug out of a trash can or a gutter, and perhaps they had. “Go down to the corner store, buy yourselves a treat,” he instructed the younger ones. His voice was gentle, yet the tone defied them to argue back. “Whatever you want.”

The boy grabbed the bills and bolted, the girl at his heels. “You’ve got to share,” she said. “Dub, tell him he’s got to go halves.”

“Be nice, Terrell,” he said. “You know you have to look after Tourmaline when I’m not around.” He waited until the plywood door swung back into place before he spoke to Tess again. “They don’t need to know everything I do. Besides, I stay away from that side of things. Lloyd and me, we run a few low-risk games, when there’s time and opportunity.”

“Like a snow day,” Tess said, remembering that school had been canceled the day that Crow and Lloyd first met. “But on Wednesday-”

“That day with the Mercedes? Staff-development day at the school, so they let us out two hours early. But I always told Lloyd that I would draw the line at anything to do with Bennie Tep.”

“Bennie Tep?”

“He’s the drug dealer that Le’andro worked for. Lloyd, too, for a while, but Bennie got no use for Lloyd. Says he lacks focus, can’t be trusted to do even small things right. But Le’andro liked Lloyd, if only because Lloyd was fool enough to think that Le’andro was someone worth looking up to. He let him hang around, threw him some little things he didn’t want to do.”

“Things like using an ATM card in a very precise way, at a very precise time?”

Dub didn’t answer, so Tess continued. “That’s practically public record at this point. Lloyd’s admitted as much to me. It was in the newspaper a week ago Sunday, only without Lloyd’s name attached. Which is probably the reason that Le’andro was killed-because Lloyd pretended he was the only one in on the scam.”

“Yeah, okay. Back last fall, Lloyd bragged on how they put one over on this guy big-time-that he tried to double-cross Lloyd, but Lloyd triple-crossed him.”

“They? You mean Le’andro and Lloyd fooled this guy Bennie?”

“No, not Bennie. Lloyd wouldn’t never have fucked with Bennie. This guy, you know, he wasn’t gonna to be around ongoing. I think he was from out of town. So Lloyd thought he could put a few extra things on the card. What was the guy gonna do? And, sure enough, we-he-didn’t catch no flak over it. No one ever came around, asked what was up, told him he had done wrong. If anything, Lloyd wished he’d held that card a little longer, charged a little more.”

Of course, that would have created a longer, more detailed trail for investigators in the Youssef murder. Which meant, Tess realized, that Lloyd really didn’t have any idea at the time how radioactive that ATM card was, how much trouble it could cause.

“So Lloyd told you about this?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he have any details about the guy who hired Le’andro?”

“Naw. He didn’t know him.”

“But did Le’andro mention a name, say where he was from? Any new scrap of information would help, maybe keep the police from trying to charge Lloyd with being an accomplice.”

Dub thought. “Lloyd said the man drove a punk-ass car. Some shitty Chevy, like a Malibu or something. Said thieving wasn’t what it used to be if a player like this had to drive something that raggedy.”

“But I thought he never met the guy.”

“He didn’t.”

“So how could he know what he drove?”

“Maybe Le’andro told him.”

Tess tried to work this through. Lloyd hadn’t met the man who hired Le’andro, but he knew the make of his car. Had Lloyd been lying all along? Was Dub lying now, intent on shielding his friend? But then if the man who gave the ATM card to Le’andro had met Lloyd, knew who he was or at least what he looked like, why hadn’t he killed them both once the story got out?

“Lloyd ever mention Gregory Youssef to you?”

“Who?”

“It’s been on the front page of the papers just this past week-”

Dub’s blank look persuaded her to abandon the story before she began it. She was talking to a homeless seventeen-year-old, a kid who was trying to go to school, keep his family together, and stay one step ahead of whatever forces-his mother, the Department of Social Services-would break them up. Dub had heard Lloyd’s side of things, nothing more.

“Look, is there anything I can do for you?”

He looked wary. “Naw. We fine.”

“I mean money, groceries. I know you don’t want DSS in your life, but there’s got to be a better way to keep your family together.”

“We’ll be okay. I got one more year of high school, then I’ll get a scholarship, go to community college part-time, work the rest. When I’m eighteen, I can petition for custody of Terrell and Tourmaline, official like, and I won’t have to fight my mom for theirses checks anymore. Then I’ll get those two through. Long as we show up for school and don’t cause trouble, no one needs to know anything about us.”

“What do you use for a mailing address?”

Dub smiled as if he found Tess naïve. By his standards, she was.

“How much do you and Lloyd get for the tire trick?”

Dub shrugged as if he had no idea what she was referencing, although he had already admitted his role. He might not have been born this cagey, but life had schooled him as well as the Baltimore city school system, probably better.

“Twenty? Forty?” Tess took three twenties from her wallet. “The way I see it, my household has thwarted you twice.” When he didn’t reach for the money, she added, “I pay for information all the time. You earned this, same as anyone. No special treatment, no handout.”

“I didn’t tell you much,” he said, his fingers closing over the bills.

“You know, I can find odd jobs for you,” she said. “My office isn’t two miles from here, and my aunt has a bookstore nearby. Between us, there are lots of little jobs, things that would work around your school schedule. And my aunt’s store stays open late. She’d let you hang there until closing-”

“We fine,” he repeated.

27

Back in her car, Tess checked her watch. Almost six, but that was early in high-powered-lawyer land. The secretaries and receptionists might have gone home, but she was betting that a young comer such as Wilma Youssef was still at her desk-depending on her day-care situation.

Wilma worked at one of Baltimore’s better-known firms, a string of Italian and Jewish surnames where politicians came to roost when they tired of public life or, in some cases, the public had tired of them prematurely. In fact, the most recent U.S. attorney, the one who had seen Youssef’s death largely as a publicity bonanza, had dropped hints about how much he would like to work here, to no avail. It wasn’t his Republican affiliation; the firm was apolitical, throwing its weight behind power and money and those who already had them. But the firm also valued discretion, and the former U.S. attorney had failed to impress on that score. High in the glossy white IBM tower near the harbor, this was a genteel, old-fashioned law practice, one that eschewed criminal cases in favor of civil ones. Again, it was all about money.

Wilma Youssef, squirreled away in a small office far from the pristine reception area, did not appear to be getting her share, not yet. This was not where partners sat, Tess decided after sweet-talking a custodian into unlocking the main doors for her and pointing her toward Wilma’s office. She had claimed to be a client with an appointment, which barely seemed a lie.

Wilma jumped a little when Tess appeared in her doorway.

“Have you decided to cooperate with the police?” Wilma asked, skipping past any pretend niceties.

“I’m prepared to make a deal with you. You get your husband’s safe-deposit box open, find out what’s in it-and then I’ll name my informant.”

Okay, she would name Lloyd in a few days in order to avoid prosecution on the mortgage charge. It was still the truth. Why shouldn’t she leverage it any way she could?

“What do the two things have to do with each other?”

“Nothing, probably. But I want to be sure of that. See, I’ve been thinking. Someone made your husband’s death look like what it wasn’t. So then we all jumped to the conclusion that it must be the other, a virtuous prosecutor cut down for his work. Maybe that’s not it either.”

Wilma was one of those fair, thin-skinned blondes who blushed readily and deeply from emotion.

“I’ve lived through the past five months with all this crap innuendo about my husband, delivered our child even as the nurses were gossiping about Greg. Was he gay? Did he have a lover? You, better than anyone, should know that my husband was murdered because of something he had worked on. Why do you persist in protecting these people?”

“These people?”

Once in full blush, a person can hardly moderate the meaning of the blood that has rushed to the face. But Tess thought she saw a flicker of shame in Wilma’s expression.

“Drug dealers, I mean. Criminals.”

Tess plopped herself into the chair opposite Wilma’s desk, tired of waiting for an invitation. “My source isn’t pure, I’ll grant you that. In fact, if the informant in this case didn’t have a record, I doubt I would have ever extracted any information to begin with. But the source isn’t a drug dealer, I can guarantee you that.”

“Still-”

Tess had read of people tossing their heads but seldom seen it done with any true flair. Wilma, however, managed to execute the gesture with style, lifting her chin with the force of a skittish racehorse being led into post position at Pimlico. Too bad that her blond hair was too short and too lacquered with spray to make a satisfactory mane.

“Still,” Tess echoed. “You mean there’s your husband’s death, which matters, and the life of my informant, which matters to you not at all.”

“My husband is dead. Your informant is a lowlife who needs to be coerced into doing his civic duty.”

“Less than forty-eight hours after the newspaper article appeared-the one that detailed how your husband’s ATM card was handed over, along with the code and explicit instructions on how and when to use it-a teenager was killed in Baltimore. Shot to death while standing on a corner.”

“So?”

“So the kid, Le’andro Watkins, was the one who was supposed to handle the ATM card, but he passed it on to someone else-my source. My source talks, Le’andro is killed.”

“These things happen.”

“Exactly. Young black kids get shot and killed in East Baltimore. And, by the way, men who live secret lives sometimes end up on the wrong side of a trick, too. ‘These things happen.’ But what if they’re happening this time because someone knows what it looks like, how the crimes will be perceived? We have two homicides that are meant to look like something they’re not. That’s the connection.”

Wilma was settling down, listening to Tess’s words, allowing intellect to trump emotion. Met under the best of circumstances, Wilma Youssef was never going to be a kindred spirit. She struck Tess as incurious and self-centered, a woman who lived her entire life as if she inhabited some abstract gated community where all evil could be kept at bay. Her religious beliefs and early good fortune in life had made her smug, dogmatic.

But for Tess to dismiss her because they agreed on so little would be no different from Wilma’s disdain for “those people.” She was a widow, a single mother trying to perform in a job that was demanding and exhausting under any conditions. She yearned for the truth, but she was terrified of it, too.

And that, more than anything, seemed to Tess the universal human condition.

“If I open the box and what’s inside doesn’t have any relevance to Greg’s death, will you agree to keep it confidential?”

Tess wondered just where Wilma’s imagination had taken her over the past few months. Some very dark places, no doubt, places far scarier than any gossiping nurse could imagine.

“Absolutely. But we need to expedite this, okay? I don’t know how it’s done-you’re the lawyer-but there’s got to be a way for you, as your husband’s heir, to get into that safe-deposit box quickly. Maybe a judge in Orphans’ Court, maybe-”

“A judge already has ruled,” Wilma said, sheepish for once. “It’s actually pretty automatic when a spouse dies. In fact, the bank has told me they’ll open it for me whenever I can make it in.”

“So why haven’t you examined its contents if you had the right all along?”

Wilma shook her head, clearly not trusting herself to speak for a few seconds, then said, “Pandora’s box, you know? I’m scared what might be unleashed.”

“Hope was in Pandora’s box, too. Don’t forget that. The last thing that came out was hope.”

28

Gabe could tell that Collins was surprised by the invite-a drink? just the two of us?-prompting another bout of anxiety for Gabe. What if he really does think I’m a fag? The rejoinder in his head-but he’s black, and I’m not into black chicks, so why would I be into black guys?-made him feel only more squirmy and strange. Even on the telephone with Collins, he felt awkward and tongue-tied, like he was a teenager calling a girl.

But all Collins said, after an interminable pause, was “Okay, where?”

Even that simple question provoked another round of second-guessing. It had to be a guy-guy place, but not so obvious a guy place that it would look like Gabe was insecure about that stuff. Besides, a sports bar would be too rowdy for conversation.

“Um, that martini bar? The new one on Canton Square?”

“Sure,” Collins said. “What time?”

“Eight?”

Shit, he had to figure out a way to stop speaking in questions around the guy. He decided to get to the bar early, so he’d have a drink in progress, be in control of the situation. But the lack of street parking undermined him, and he arrived fifteen minutes late, which clearly irritated Collins. Gabe’s rushed apology, his explanation that he had parked far away, didn’t seem to help much.

But once Gabe got going, laid out the connections he had uncovered, he could tell that Collins was impressed.

“Do you know for a fact that this Keyes guy helped to hide the source and her boyfriend?”

“No, but we always figured they went by car, right? It’s the beach, off season. The locals probably notice every out-of-towner, especially some salt-and-pepper combo.”

Shit, what he wouldn’t have given to take that back.

Collins took a long swallow of his Heineken. He was drinking from a glass, which made Gabe feel as if there were something unmanly about settling for a bottle, Sam Adams at that, although he was drinking shots of Jameson on the side.

“What makes you so sure,” Collins said, “that the informant is black? The fact that he bought Nikes at the Downtown Locker Room? Could be some punk-ass whigger, you know.”

“Um, I didn’t-Imean…”

Collins smiled, gave him a playful punch in the shoulder, one hard enough to leave a bruise. “I’m just busting balls. Of course the source is a black kid. Just like…”

“Just like?”

“Just like the ATM photo. Can’t see his face, but we can see his hands.”

“Right,” Gabe said. “Of course.” He wasn’t a bigot. He had simply forgotten how he knew what he knew.

“You keeping this close, this insight to where they might be? Or have you gone to Schulian, opened up an official file?”

“Hell, no. It’s our secret so far. I haven’t even told Jenkins.” Gabe was feeling the rush of camaraderie now, burbling in spite of himself. “I gotta say, I don’t have utter confidence in him. Those FBI guys are so full of themselves. I mean, what’s he ever done? You, you’ve been out there, did undercover. You risked your life.” He sensed he was entering dangerous territory, but he decided to chance it. “That was bullshit, what they put you through.”

“Before your time. How do you know of it?”

“People talk.” Collins clearly didn’t like the idea of being gossiped about, so Gabe quickly added, “Everyone thinks you got a raw deal.”

“It turned out okay. The lawsuits were dismissed. You can’t sue a federal agent doing his job-even when he botches it and shoots a citizen.”

“But it ended your time undercover after the newspaper ran your photo, and I heard you were one of the best. That sucks. It was an honest mistake, under the circumstances.”

Collins, back in his usual taciturn mode, said nothing, but Gabe thought he caught a wisp of a smile on his face, a moment of understanding. Finally, with Jenkins out of the way, they were bonding.

“Another round?” he asked. “My treat.”

“Sure,” Collins said. “Night’s young. Night’s so young that R. Kelly would date it.”

It was almost midnight when Gabe and Collins finally left the bar. Gabe was a little lit-not so much that he couldn’t drive, given that it was basically a series of straight shots and left turns until he coasted into his parking pad off Hanover. He just felt fuzzy around the edges. The air was soft, the first true spring evening so far. The season got here a little faster here than it did in Jersey, not even two hundred miles to the north. Just twenty-four hours ago, the Yankees had almost been sleeted out on Opening Day in the Bronx, but here you could see buds on the trees.

“Where you parked?” Collins asked.

He had to think about it. “I’m on Fait, like four blocks from here.”

“I’m around the corner from there,” Collins said. “I remember when this neighborhood was nothing but toothless old Polacks, the kind who would call the police if a black kid so much as rode his bike down the sidewalk.”

It was the longest sentence Collins had ever uttered in Gabe’s presence. It was so cool, them becoming friends. He could ask Collins about being a star on the Poets, or whatever that local basketball team was called. Hadn’t Juan Dixon played for them? Steve Francis? Somebody good in the NBA.

“This your ride?” Collins asked when Gabe stopped by his Acura. “Nice.”

He laughed, getting that Collins was still busting his balls, but in a friendly way. “Not particularly.”

“Nicer than a Malibu. Nice enough to get carjacked for.”

“Yeah, right. Not in this neighborhood.”

“I’m dead serious.”

Gabe hiccuped, but only because he had been laughing too much, sucking in air much of the evening. Collins could be pretty funny when he made an effort. He did an imitation of Jenkins that was to die for-the super concerned manner, the fatherly sighs.

Collins’s fist shot out, hitting Gabe so quickly and violently in the midsection that he just crumpled into the street as if his spine had been removed. What the-The last sensations he knew in this life were all metal-the scrape of the keys being dragged from his fingers, the barrel of a gun at the back of his head. He didn’t piss himself, but only because Collins was moving even faster than Gabe’s instincts could. He was going to die, and the only thing he managed to figure out before it happened was that it had absolutely nothing to do with his car. Did I-

Gone.

TUESDAY
29

Tess and Wilma had agreed to meet at the bank when it opened, which meant Tess had to leave Baltimore at 8:00 A.M. and fight rush-hour traffic every inch of the trip. Even without all the frazzled commuters, it would have been a charmless journey. The bank, a branch of a multinational that was relatively new in the state, was on a strip clogged with chain restaurants and stores catering to every part of one’s automobile-fast-lube places, tire joints, brake jobs, windshield glass.

“Why here?” Tess asked Wilma. “It’s quite a haul from where you live and where he worked. It’s not like he could get here on his lunch hour.”

“Probably because it’s one place I’d never come. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before in my life.” Wilma’s face was grayish, as if the suburb of Laurel were a disease she was worried about catching.

The bank manager studied the court order in a way that made Tess fear complications. A chubby Latina packed into a bright yellow suit, the manager had the air of someone who would make things difficult just because it would make her day more interesting. But perhaps she was simply a slow reader, for she handed the paper back to Wilma and led them into the small area the bank kept for safe-deposit boxes.

“She can’t come in,” the woman said, pointing at Tess. “And I gotta watch.”

“I’m an officer of the court,” said Tess, who had prepared the lie ahead of time, along with a reasonably official-looking ID, created on her computer and then laminated at a twenty-four-hour hardware store last night. She had also talked to Tyner, who’d assured her that there was no law requiring a bank employee to observe, but some insisted on it, if only out of sheer nosiness. “The order specifies that this has to be done under supervision because the estate is still in probate. She’s allowed to inventory the contents but not to remove them.”

The woman looked skeptical-as well she should, because nothing Tess had said was remotely true-but fate decided to throw Tess a bone. Another bank employee arrived at that moment with a pink, orange, and white Dunkin’ Donuts box. Saved by the cruller. Anxious to make her selection, the woman waved them in.

Wilma’s hands shook as she fitted her key into the lock. She then took the box, a medium-size one, to the semiprivate area set aside. She lifted the lid and revealed a black-and-white photocopy of a bearded man in a straw hat, a man who looked strangely familiar to Tess. There was a layer of pink tissue paper beneath it. When Tess pushed it aside, the overwhelming impression was a landscape of green, a veritable Emerald City in a box.

“I thought you were the earner and Greg was the one who was bound for glory,” she said.

Wilma was silent for a moment. “That-that-asshole,” she said at last. Tess regularly heard-and said-far worse words, but it was a shock to see the prim and self-righteous Wilma let loose this way. “If you knew how tight things were for us at times-college loans, the baby, the mortgage on the new house. Although now I understand where he got some of the cash to buy the new house. He said that he had borrowed money from his mother.”

“I hope you reported it as a loan on your mortgage application,” Tess said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Should we count it?”

“Not really. If I know how much it is, I think I might get angrier. Whatever Greg was doing, there wasn’t…It couldn’t be…It had to be…” Illegal, Tess wanted to say, but Wilma still wasn’t ready to concede that. “He got himself killed, and for what? We would have been okay, in the long run. I would have made partner. He could have gone into private practice if it came to that. What was the rush?”

Tess had extracted one bundle of cash, counted it, and done some quick multiplication in her head. Sixteen packs, $10,000 per pack-$160,000, give or take. “He was shaking someone down. Who?”

“I don’t know,” Wilma said. “Honestly.”

Tess pulled up each pack of bills, to make sure there was nothing left in the box.

“What are you looking for?” Wilma asked, her voice at once bitter and teary. It was clear that this secret cache, if not exactly what she had feared all along, was also anything but an innocuous discovery. “Waiting for hope to fly out? I don’t think she’s here.”

“A note. But I guess that would be too easy, right? A nice and neat confession about what he was into.”

“To write something like that, he would have to believe he was in imminent danger. And the one thing I’m sure about the last time I saw Greg alive is that he was buoyant, happy. In fact, he was happier in the weeks before his death than he’d been in a long time. He went into a horrible mope around the time I got pregnant. At the time I thought it was money woes-”

“Could be. Maybe this was a sudden windfall, and that’s why he cheered up. He was in antiterrorism, right? This would be chump change to some of those Saudis.” Tess was studying the log-Greg had last visited the bank in September. The account had been opened in August year before last, and he had been here monthly, through July. Then-nothing.

“Maybe.” Wilma’s eyes were on the money, but she wasn’t seeing it. She was trapped in her own thoughts. “Only, we bought the house last winter. I found out I was pregnant in March, and he was irritable from then on. I worried that he felt trapped in a way he hadn’t before. But come fall his bad mood vanished. On Halloween, when the kids came to the door, he was just so into it. He said to me, ‘I can’t wait until our little boy does that.’ Something changed over the summer.”

The employees’ doughnut buzz was fading fast, and Tess thought it would be best to put the drawer back in place, continue their conversation elsewhere. At the last minute, she grabbed the Xeroxed photograph, stashing it in her pocket.

She steered Wilma to the Silver Diner, not even fifty yards up the highway. It was an ersatz diner, the kind of faux-fifties place that Tess didn’t normally condone, but it was the best bet for breakfast in these parts.

“Think back to Greg’s work,” Tess said. “Was there anyone he might have blackmailed?”

“No. The terrorism unit was having virtually no luck. Truth is, Greg was kind of floundering since the transfer. He was brought on for PR, a suitable face to put before the cameras. The dirty little secret about the FBI’s antiterrorism work is that there is no work. Until, well, there is again. Get me?”

Tess did, but she didn’t want to think about it.

“What about his earlier cases, the drug stuff he did?”

“He was known for being a hard-liner and getting convictions. In fact, he was contemptuous of his colleagues who couldn’t nail suspects no matter how close they got. So who would pay him off? He got the federal death penalty for that one group of gang members.”

Wilma said the last with great pride, reminding Tess that the two of them did not see eye to eye on many things. Tess opposed the death penalty in theory, and it pained her that she had taken another man’s life so readily. But she was learning to hold her tongue and her opinions. She and Wilma weren’t here to become BFFs.

“In the terrorism unit-was there anything he said about his work that centered on a single individual? They might not have been making arrests, but they still could have been up on wiretaps, monitoring someone. A wealthy Saudi Arabian might have paid money to know what his unit was doing, skimpy as it was.”

Wilma shook her head. “I’m telling you, all he did was speak of their incompetence and the futility of the whole operation.”

“So why did he volunteer for it in the first place?”

“I’m not sure. He’d been working a few things with a guy named Mike Collins, but he said Collins couldn’t bring him anything good since he stopped working undercover. You have to understand-the way the office is set up, the AUSA’s are often dependent on agents to bring them good cases.”

“But he must have known other agents.”

“He liked Mike best and thought he’d gotten a raw deal. Do you know him?”

“Yeah, I know him.” Tess decided not to share that she wasn’t his biggest fan.

“Greg really admired him. An authentic Horatio Alger story, up from the streets, basketball star at Langston Hughes.”

“Dunbar,” Tess corrected absently. She dug the photocopy out of her pocket, stared at the old man in the hat.

“Whatever.”

“He talked about Mike a lot?”

“I don’t know if I’d say ‘a lot.’ Enough that I knew he resented the agency’s treatment of him.”

“Wilma-”

“What?”

“Did you ever have a crush on a guy?”

“Sometimes.” Wilma’s tone was smug, as if to suggest she was far more familiar with being an object of crushes, not a holder of them.

“So when you were obsessed with some guy, didn’t you say his name over and over, whenever you could, bring him up in the most irrelevant conversations, just to have the thrill of saying his name?”

Wilma blushed her furious blush. “Greg was not queer for Mike Collins.”

“No, but they might have shared a secret that they would be even more desperate to conceal.” Tess showed her the photocopy. “This is taken from one of those literary postcards you can buy at Nouveau or Barnes amp; Noble. It’s Walt Whitman.”

“So?”

“Poet. Poet. If Mike Collins played for Dunbar, then he was a star on the Poets. I guess he couldn’t find a Dunbar postcard, so he settled for Whitman. ‘I sing the body electric’? ‘I dote on myself, for there is that lot of me, and all so luscious’?”

Wilma, despite her Ivy League education, still looked mystified. But Tess had no doubt that her husband had hedged his bets, leaving this subtle clue for someone who would eventually make the connection but treat Youssef’s old friend with dignity and respect. Who else had to know that Collins played for the Poets?

Jenkins had been surprised to find Mike Collins at his door first thing that morning. As much as he liked the young man, he’d never had him to his apartment. In fact, he didn’t even realize that Mike knew where he lived.

He wondered what else Bully knew about him.

“You want coffee?” he asked, although the kid seemed so wired that a shot of Jameson might have been more appropriate.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Well, I need some.”

He motioned Collins to follow him into the apartment’s kitchen, not that it was a trip that required a tour guide. Since returning to Baltimore, Jenkins had lived in one of those sterile, rent-by-the-month gigs, already furnished. The kitchen was separated from the so-called great room by a Formica-topped bar. Collins sat there, perched on one of the wicker stools that had come with the place, rocking a little from side to side. Kid was het-up. Jenkins hoped he wasn’t doing drugs, a curious but not unheard-of liability for DEA agents. But Collins’s disdain for drugs had always been persuasively virulent. He saw them as a plague that had swept through his once-middle-class neighborhood, destroying almost every young black man in their path. No, it was impossible to imagine Collins using drugs.

Jenkins pulled out his filters and the can of grounds he kept in the freezer, although he was always hearing conflicting opinions on that method of storage. It seemed to him that they kept changing the rules about everything. Plastic cutting boards, wooden cutting boards, back to plastic. Coffee with tap water, coffee with purified water, coffee with eggshells and old socks, back to tap water. Whatever Jenkins did, he made crap coffee, but at least it was cheap. Jenkins didn’t like giving someone two dollars for something he could make at home for a fraction of the cost. Made him feel like a sucker. He thought about Gabe Dalesio, who never seemed to be without a large cup of pricey coffee. The guy must have spent at least four, five dollars a day on coffee drinks. Four dollars a day, almost thirty dollars a week, over fifteen hundred dollars a year on coffee. Jenkins’s first wife, Martha, had criticized Jenkins for the way he tipped, the ones and fives and even tens that had slipped through his fingers so readily. But a tip went to a person at least, not some corporation. You hand a girl a five-dollar tip for checking your coat and you make her day. Give Mr. Starbucks or Ms. Seattle’s Best Coffee three dollars for some fancy hot drink and you were just one of the multitudes of suckers.

The coffee machine puffed and huffed, quite a production for the task of pouring hot water over a paper filter of coffee grounds. It tasted better if you waited until the whole pot brewed, but Jenkins could never resist pulling the carafe out and letting his mug catch the first syrupy cupful.

“You sure you don’t want any?”

“I’m fine.”

It was only when Jenkins turned back to the counter, FBI mug in his hand, that he saw the gun on the counter. Not a service revolver, his mind registered. A street weapon, a piece of shit. Then: Why does Mike have it? Why is he showing it to me?

“Mike,” he said, his voice soft and pleading. “Bully. What’s this about? What’s wrong?”

Even in this agitated state, he was so very handsome. Extremely dark-skinned, with features that had always seemed vaguely Native American to Jenkins-strong straight nose, high cheekbones, a bow-shaped mouth. That mouth was trembling, just a little now. Yet any show of emotion in Collins’s face was noteworthy.

“Mike…?”

The young man picked up the gun, studying it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was or where it had come from, then put it back down.

“I…I may have overstepped, Barry.”

“Overstepped?”

“Gabe Dalesio learned something, and it struck me as key, but I knew if we acted on it, he might begin to put things together. So, um, I killed him.”

This was a new situation to him. As a father to his own sons, Jenkins had been the one who disappointed, who stood before his children’s sorrowful and disapproving faces again and again. Here at last was his chance to assure someone that it was okay to screw up, to give comfort and succor.

Succor. Funny word. Say it out loud and it sounded just like “sucker.”

“You used this gun?”

“Yeah. Out on the street, like it was a carjacking or a robbery gone wrong. I took it off a drug dealer years ago. There’s no paper on it.”

“You take the car?”

“No, but I grabbed his wallet and his keys. Then I went to see a woman I know out Hunt Valley way, one who’s not too fussy about advance notice.”

“What you kids call a booty call?” Collins managed a feeble smile at Jenkins’s deliberate squareness. “That was smart, Bully.” This earned a genuine smile, one of relief and pride. “And you didn’t use your service weapon, smarter still. Now we just have to throw this one down the sewer.”

“And go to Delaware?”

“Delaware?”

“That’s what Dalesio found. There’s an ex-cop, held the liquor license on the dad’s bar, and he’s also listed as the founding partner in the girl’s business. He figured that a guy like that was probably in the habit of doing the family favors.”

“Well, that sure is interesting.” But not worth killing another federal prosecutor for. “I mean, it’s worth checking out. Still sounds like a bit of a long shot to me. Why would an ex-cop shield someone wanted in a murder investigation?”

“Dalesio did some preliminary checking. He pulled a reverse directory, started calling some of the guy’s neighbors. There was some strange guy drinking beer with him just yesterday.”

“Strange?”

“Unknown, not a familiar face. White, youngish. Could be the boyfriend. We should go over there.”

“Throw the gun down the sewer. Then go to work.”

“Work?”

“A federal prosecutor was killed last night. You don’t know that now, but it will be all over your office soon after you get there. And while you may have his wallet-throw that down the sewer, too, okay?-police will have already traced the car registration back to him. Go into work and be glad, for once, that they treat you like shit. I’ll do the same thing, and we’ll do what we’ve been doing all along: keep our eyes and ears open, figure out who knows what, then proceed according to an orderly plan of my devising.”

Collins winced a little, picking up the implicit criticism in that one stressed word, and Jenkins realized that he had to modulate his tone. “It’s okay, Bully. You did okay. Just let me do the thinking. It worked with Youssef, didn’t it? We took our sweet time, and it was just about perfect.”

“Except for the kid using the ATM card again. And then that private eye came along.”

“Yeah, well, she’s got other fish to fry now.” Jenkins wondered fleetingly how they would continue to press her without Gabe. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe they really did have the information they’d sought all along. “The thing is, we’ve got to do this without involving civilians. Mike? You feel me?”

Another wisp of a smile from Collins for the way Jenkins sounded when he aped that ghetto talk.

“If this little fucker is at the beach, we’ve got to take him into custody and isolate him. Set him up to run from us, then do the old throw-down. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated.”

“I get it.”

“You sure? Because we’re up to two more bodies than we ever planned to have. I don’t blame you for Youssef-he tricked you into telling him what we had going, demanded in, then wanted out. He was a liability, and we had to get rid of him. But this…”

Collins’s shoulders sagged. The kid meant well. But his central flaw could not be fixed. When in doubt, he went for his gun. It was a weird defect, one usually found in female officers, but it had been okay as long as Collins kept shooting criminals. It was only when he shot that civilian that he’d gotten in such deep shit. Irony was, he’d been absolutely justified for once. The guy had refused to stop, just kept coming at Collins, one of those old-timers who thought he could beat a drug dealer with a rake, fucking up a big buy that Collins had spent eight months getting to that moment. The geezer was lucky to have survived, in Jenkins’s opinion.

“Go to work, Bully,” he said. “The minute someone tells you about Gabe, say, ‘Holy shit! I was having a drink with him last night. He was telling me his theories about the Youssef case.’ Don’t say anything that can be contradicted by an eyewitness. You walked out with him. Walked most of the way to his car with him because you were parked in the same direction. Admit that you were a little lit-”

“I wasn’t, actually.”

“Admit that you were a little lit, that you went out to visit your lady friend and barely had time to change your clothes before coming in to work. Get me? We’re in assessment mode today.”

Collins left, and Jenkins sat at his kitchen table, head in hands. How had it all gone so wrong? It had been so perfect on paper, so bloodless and simple, money coming in and no one going out. He added up the death toll in his head. Youssef, Dalesio. Oh, and the kid, Le’andro Watkins, not that the world could really mourn a lowlife who was going to kill or be killed before his twenty-first birthday.

And now they had to find this other kid, set him up. But then they would be done. It had to end there. Please, let it fucking end.

30

Tess had planned to go straight to her office from Laurel, but she headed home instead. WBAL was reporting on a street murder in Canton, the kind of crime sure to spook the area’s yuppies and tourists. When the newscast yielded to the morning call-in show, she could hear people trying to extract the detail that would establish that the crime was somehow the victim’s fault. Was it a domestic? No, it appeared to be a robbery and attempted carjacking. Was it someone driving a flashy car? Not clear. A man cruising for…um, female companionship? The callers were desperate for proof that no crime or misfortune was ever truly random. Tess thought it more remarkable that such murders were so infrequent. It was less than a mile from the swank condos on the Canton waterfront to the desperate neighborhood where Dub, Terrell, and Tourmaline squatted in an abandoned rowhouse.

At home she found another FedEx with another cell phone-Crow had thought to waive the signature this time-but after several futile minutes with the instructions, she realized she had hit the wall of her own technological limitations. There probably was a way to download the digital photos she wanted to send Crow from her camera to the phone and then to his phone, but it would take a better mind than hers. She decided to use her laptop, setting up a neutral Hotmail account, then forwarding the photos there. She would call Crow on the new phone and give him the password, then hope he could get to a computer to view them.

The problem was, she had no proof that Mike Collins was anything other than the concerned federal agent he purported to be. She called her one good friend in the Baltimore City homicide squad, Detective Martin Tull.

“Not a good time,” the detective said with his customary curtness. “Got a red ball so far up my ass that it might end up coming out of my nose the next time I blow it.”

“Canton, yeah, I heard it on ’BAL. I’ll be quick. You got an open case on a kid named Le’andro Watkins? He was killed last week. Shot, typical drug-murder stuff.” Or so it would appear.

A moment of silence. Tull must be glancing at the board that carried the cases, listed by number and victims’ last names. The board was color-coded-black for closed ones, red for those still open. Tess would bet anything there was a sea of red on the board this year.

Tull came back on the line. “Yeah, that’s Rainier’s.”

Shit. If Tess had only one friend in homicide, she also had only one enemy. Still, she didn’t carry a grudge, and maybe Rainier didn’t either. In the end she had done right by him, handed him a bouquet of clearances. Tess had probably helped Rainier earn his highest clearance rate since he joined the department.

“He around?”

“That worthless fucker called in from the field this morning, said he was doing some interviews. He’s hiding, worried that he’ll be pulled to help on this case.”

“Got a cell for him?”

“Yeah. And maybe he’ll answer if he doesn’t see the 396 prefix.” All city numbers, including those from police headquarters, began with those three numbers.

“Good luck,” Tess said. “I owe you one.”

“You’ve lost count if you think all you owe me is one.”

“Final question: If you were the kind of homicide detective who ever pretended to be out in the field to avoid a difficult assignment-we all know you’d never do that, just being theoretical here-but if you were that kind of detective and you weren’t working and you didn’t want to be found, where would you be?”

Tull began laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

‘Truth be told, I’d go to your father’s bar, because no one’s ever going to find anyone in that little bend of Franklintown Road. But if I were Jay Rainier-and I thank God every day that I’m not-I’d be on Fort Avenue. He came up through Southern District patrol, has a soft spot for Locust Point.”

“Tull, there’s a bar in almost every block of Fort.”

“Yeah, but it’s only, what, two, three miles long? And it’s a nice day for a pub crawl. Cool, but sunny.”

Tess called Crow’s new number but got no answer. She left careful instructions about how to access the Hotmail account, then made a quick costume change before heading to South Baltimore, trading her suede jacket for a nylon windbreaker of a startling bright blue, lined with synthetic plush of the same color. It had belonged to her father and still had his name, Patrick, embroidered on the front.

But it was the back, proclaiming Tess a member of the Colts Corral, No. 34, that should make the Fort Avenue bartenders warm to her.

Crow and Lloyd were loading supplies at the 84 Lumber off Route 26 when the cell rang, and Crow couldn’t get his hands free to answer it without dropping a two-by-four on Lloyd’s toe. It was wonderful just to hear it ring, to know Tess was trying to get in touch with him. He checked the message on the drive back, listened to her breathless instructions to get to a computer and review the photos she had sent.

But the South Coastal Library, so helpful in all other respects, thwarted him. Its computer network was loaded with virus protections that refused to allow him to download the images Tess had forwarded. One of the librarians could probably help him bypass the program, but Crow didn’t want to risk drawing that much attention to himself. Maybe Ed had a computer.

“We take technology too much for granted,” he said to Lloyd as they drove back to Fenwick.

“What you mean?”

“We assume everyone has a cell phone, computers, Internet access-or that cell phones will always work or we’ll be able to find a wireless hot spot when we need it. Can you imagine the chaos if terrorists or hackers brought down all the landlines and cell access and wireless connections for even an hour? If you couldn’t call anyone, use an ATM, send an e-mail?”

“I’d be okay,” Lloyd said.

Crow started to explain that Lloyd was missing the larger point of what he was trying to describe, the global nature of technological dependence. But Lloyd had spoken a simple truth. Lloyd would be okay, probably better than most. On the day that the shit really came down-when buildings fell again or if a similar nightmare scenario played out-Crow wouldn’t mind having Lloyd Jupiter at his side.

Fort Avenue dead-ended into Fort McHenry, the star-shaped fort where a pivotal battle in the War of 1812 had inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In honor of that deed, the fort had commissioned a statue of Orpheus-or, as locals called him, that naked guy with the harp. Tess parked in the public lot and began heading west along a street where there was a bar, on average, every two blocks.

She had not been in the Locust Point section of Baltimore for two years, and the area had changed considerably, like most of the city’s waterfront. She could see the shells of expensive town houses-at this width and price, they would never allow themselves to be called rowhouses-rising by the harbor, and there was a fancy-schmancy bakery, the kind of place where a cupcake cost almost as much as a Lady Baltimore in the old-fashioned stalls in Cross Street Market. But most of the old bars were hanging on, with only a few chichi interlopers. Given that her father was once an inspector for the liquor board, Tess couldn’t help speculating why so many licenses had been granted in the area. It had to be tied to political patronage; the question was whether it implied a surplus of clout or a complete lack thereof. She also wondered how many of the places made illegal payouts on the video poker games where, even at midday, stonefaced zombies sat pressing buttons forlornly.

The bartenders at such places were expert at protecting their regulars, especially from women inquiring after them. But with reasonable deployments of charm and cash, she managed to ascertain whether Jay Rainier was known in these parts. “Captain Larry’s?” the bartender at Truman’s volunteered, but the skipper there sent her to Hogan’s Alley, which recommended the End Zone, a cruel joke, as that bar had been replaced by a yuppie joint, the Idle Hour. She had worked her way almost two miles down Fort Avenue when she found the man himself in Dorothy’s, a pale lager and a large cheeseburger in front of him.

“Don’t you worry about mad cow disease?” Tess asked, taking the stool next to him.

“Hmmmph,” Rainier said, his mouth full.

“Me neither. I’ll have what the gentleman’s having, medium rare, Swiss cheese if you’ve got it.”

“And a Coors Light, too?” the waitress asked.

Tess didn’t believe in the light version of anything. She studied the handles on the draft taps. “Yuengling.”

“You want fries with that?” The waitress’s tone suggested she had a vested interest in Tess’s weight.

“I want fries with everything.”

“Hey, Monaghan,” Rainer said after a hard swallow. He seemed wary but not unfriendly. “Is this a chance encounter?”

“Not exactly.”

“Fuck me.” There was no edge to his words, however. He studied the silent television above them, tuned to ESPN. “Second real day of the baseball season and probably the last one that the Mets will be in first place.”

Tess nodded in pretend empathy. She had been brought up to hate the Mets more than any other team in major-league baseball. The very mention of 1969-the year that Baltimore teams had lost to New York ones in the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NBA championships-could ruin her father’s day.

“I hear you caught a case-”

“Of the clap? You doing STD investigation now for Public Health? That would be a step up for you, prestigewise.” Rainier’s tone remained listless, as if he really couldn’t summon the energy to taunt Tess.

“Le’andro Watkins. Teenager, killed last week.”

“Yeah, that’s a winner, ain’t it?”

“You’ve developed any leads?”

“None at all. Usual drill. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. He was a low-level solider in a small-time drug gang.”

“Worked for Bennie Tepperson-Bennie Tep. Am I right?”

“Yeah,” he said, now more alert. “You got something for me, Monaghan? Because this one’s a total loser.”

“I might. Eventually. Was there anything to suggest that it wasn’t what it appeared to be, a straight-up retribution shooting?”

“Naw. Although I will say the East Side has been quiet lately, and Bennie’s far from a player. He’s an old-timer who’s stayed in the game by not taking a lot of risks. Hell, he’ll barely defend what territory he does have, and he’s getting a rep for putting out really weak packages. He’s never been a significant player, except in his own head.”

“You hear that from DEA?”

“Naw, our own guys are more up on it. The feds got no use for the drug stuff now, unless it’s big federal-death-penalty stuff with lots of gang violence, like those M-13s down in southern Maryland.”

“Still, the DEA was interested, right? Came around, asked a few questions?”

Rainier gave her an odd look. “Nope. No DEA involvement at all. What makes you think that?”

“You sure? I know you’re the primary, but could they have spoken to someone else?”

“Anything is possible, but I sure as hell didn’t talk to anyone. It’s not exactly one of our high-priority cases. And if a DEA agent came sniffing around, there would have been talk, you can be sure of that.”

It was what Tess had expected to hear, even feared. If Mike Collins hadn’t talked to the primary on the case, then how could he know that Le’andro Watkins was the dead kid that had scared Lloyd into running? Chances were he was the man who had killed him.

“You know a DEA agent name of Mike Collins?” she asked Rainier.

“Know of him. He’s the poor bastard who shot that geezer who tried to interrupt his drug buy. Honest mistake, and they hung him out to dry.”

“But you’ve never spoken to him, haven’t had any contact with him in the last week?”

“Nope. Never met the man.”

Tess’s lunch arrived, and she decided to abandon herself, however briefly, to the reliable pleasure of grilled meat, melted cheese, and deep-fried potatoes. “So what sent you into hiding today?”

“I’m working,” Rainier said, in on the joke for once. “Hey, it’s bad enough I’m saddled with this piece-of-shit Watkins case. I don’t see why I have to be collateral damage in a red ball as well.”

“Tourist?”

“Worse.”

“A relative of the mayor?”

“Some federal prosecutor. Probably a random thing, a straight-up carjacking, but they’re sending guys out to grab every lowlife in a five-mile radius, just in case it’s related to his work. Two AUSA’s in six months. It’s making people a little jumpy.”

The cheeseburger, which would have been a contender in any best-of-Baltimore survey, turned to ash on Tess’s tongue.

“You happen to hear the name?” she asked after a hard swallow.

“Something Italian.”

“Dalesio?”

“Yeah, like the restaurant. Dalesio. You know the guy?”

31

Live and learn, Jenkins thought. Gail Schulian wasn’t going to make the same mistake that her predecessor had, calling press conferences and vowing to avenge the death of Gabe Dalesio. She was playing this as close to the vest as possible. Here it was almost four o’clock, and the name hadn’t been released to the public yet. As far as the general population knew, the Canton carjacking was just some unlucky civilian.

Collins had done as he’d been told, gone to the bosses and spoken about his drink with a dead man. He said Dalesio had been working on some leads in the Youssef case, but it was all about trying to get the female PI to give up her source, nothing inherently dangerous.

Collins had reported the details back via cell phone, although even that made Jenkins nervous. Just their luck, some hobbyist with a scanner would pick up their conversation. But whatever Collins was, he was disciplined, and while an eavesdropper might wonder why he felt the need to relate all this to Jenkins, there was nothing in the content of their conversation to cause trouble. Yes, Collins had been a most satisfactory protégé all around.

Until he murdered Gabe Dalesio.

Killing Youssef had been bad enough, but necessary. The whole beauty of Jenkins’s scheme was that it was low-risk, a fed’s version of playing stickup man. They were stealing money from a drug dealer, and a mediocre drug dealer at that, one who was unlikely to be a target but had the old-school arrogance to think he might be. It was a scheme Jenkins had dreamed up and polished while in exile in Woodlawn, waiting for retirement and contemplating suicide. The thing was, such a scheme required a collaborator. A defense attorney had seemed the likely go-between, and Jenkins couldn’t stomach the thought of that. Then he had met Mike Collins, another former wonder boy covered in shame. As an East Sider with contacts on the ground, Bully could do what few other feds could: go straight to the source. Collins hashed out the deal, told Bennie Tep that he was coming up on wiretaps but that Collins could hold him harmless for a monthly fee. It was like selling real estate on the moon; the only way that Bennie Tep could prove they weren’t protecting him was if he got arrested by the feds, and that was never going to happen.

How had Youssef figured it out? That bugged Jenkins to this day, because if Youssef could figure it out, someone else could as well. He was such a smarmy bastard, cutting himself in when he hadn’t done any of the work. But okay, Jenkins was fine with giving him a cut, letting him collect a little Bennie Tep money, too. It didn’t even cost him and Bully anything; Mike just told Bennie that they had to bring an AUSA in to guarantee his protection, so the monthly fee went up. No, it was okay when Youssef wanted in.

It was when he wanted out that things came to a head, and the fact that he wanted to do it because he had a kid on the way just made Jenkins more nervous. Once Youssef opted out, it would be all too easy for him to turn on them if the shit ever came down. But Jenkins had smiled and shook the young man’s hand, told him there were no hard feelings, congratulated him on his soon-to-be-born son, and let him go his own way, thinking everything was peachy.

Bennie hadn’t wanted any part in killing Youssef; that would be a death-penalty crime, and he was too cautious for that. But he let Mike have one of his low-level kids set it up. Le’andro wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, but he had faked his way through his part. He got in touch with Youssef, claimed to know something about a Pakistani who was funneling money into local drug gangs, asking questions about weapons and dirty bombs. The night before Thanksgiving was supposed to be Youssef’s big score, a meeting with someone close to the Paki, arranged by Le’andro. He had headed downtown, thinking he was on his way to being a hero.

He hadn’t died heroically. He had given up the ATM number readily enough, thinking it might save his life, but the punishment had just begun. Make it look personal, Jenkins had impressed on his protégé. Make it look angry. Truth be told, Collins had succeeded a little too well at that part. In the end, when they were parked along the Patapsco in the state park, Jenkins had turned away, not wanting to see what Collins was capable of.

But it had gone according to plan, except for the moment that Youssef tried to get away by wading across the river. Collins had caught him on the other side, and he didn’t have to make it look angry then, because he was. Funny, that unplanned contingency had worked for them, too, sending the case into Howard County, where the detectives had even less experience handling homicide than Baltimore County did.

Looking back, Jenkins regretted all the thinking and conniving. The overreaching, really. He knew better. The shrewder you tried to be, the greater the likelihood that something would trip you up. The E-ZPass, for example. That little discrepancy had brought Dalesio into the investigation, and they would have been better off without him in the long run. Better off without his death for sure. And he should have known not to rely on some street kid like Le’andro. Why had he handed the ATM card off to someone else, who then screwed it all up? What had he told the other kid, if anything? Maybe they could stop now, play the odds that this other kid didn’t know anything that could implicate Bully, much less Jenkins. But if the kid dragged Bennie Tep into this, he’d sell them out in a minute. Well, sell Collins out. Bennie Tep didn’t know Jenkins existed. No, it couldn’t be risked. They had to plug this last leak.

But they had a plausible reason now. Collins was going to go to Delaware and find this kid, assuming Dalesio was right about where they were. Collins was going to finish the job that his new best friend wouldn’t be able to do, being shot down and all in the prime of his young life. They were going to find the source-no, the accomplice, which would explain why he was so desperate to evade them-and whose fault would it be if the kid pulled a gun on them, refused to be taken alive?

The only question was whether they should leave tonight or tomorrow morning. Tomorrow, he was thinking. Sick days all around. As the afternoon wore on, he started blowing his nose, talking a little raspier than usual, complaining about the pollen. He even sneezed a couple of times, not that a single one of his so-called colleagues said so much as gesundheit or bless you. Well, fuck you guys, too.

Tess hadn’t realized how lucky she’d been, getting Tull on her first try that morning. Despite her multiple urgent voice mails and pages, even with the “ 911” code appended, it was almost seven before he got back to her. It was hard, competing with the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney-even when you had what might be relevant information. Tull sounded weary and stressed, the end of his day still distant.

“There’s this DEA agent, Mike Collins-”

“We’ve talked to Mike Collins,” he said. “He had a drink with Dalesio in Canton, said good-bye to him in front of the bar, and headed out. He told his boss, and his boss told him to come talk to us. And yes, we know that Gabe Dalesio was pressing you on the Youssef murder.”

“Tull, Collins is the killer. There was no carjacking. This is what this guy does. He makes murders look like, well, other murders. A carjacking in this case. I think he also did Youssef and that street kid I was asking you about, Le’andro Watkins. See? He plays with the stereotypes of homicide, makes us see what we expect to see.”

“Tess, I know they’ve been leaning on you, but this is beyond paranoid.”

“But he could have done it, right? He was with him right before.”

“Sure, if we’re talking about the mere physics of the situation. As a problem of time and space, it’s possible. But why in hell would a DEA agent kill this guy, much less the other two?”

It was an excellent question. Tess pondered the stray bits of information she had gathered-the money in Youssef’s account, the death of a teenager who worked for a drug dealer, a teenager whose name that Collins knew, a teenager who was connected to Youssef’s ATM card. She felt like she was working a monochromatic jigsaw puzzle. The pieces fit theoretically, but trying to piece them together could make you go blind. Or mad.

“Would you pull him in for questioning tomorrow, hold him on that pretext until I make some…um, arrangements?”

“Not without a lot more information.”

“I’m sure that Collins killed Dalesio, Martin.” The use of his first name, which Tull loathed, was almost a code between them, a sign that Tess was as serious as she ever got. “Maybe because Dalesio figured something out that he wasn’t supposed to know.”

“Is this insight coming from your elusive source?” There was an unmistakable edge to Tull’s voice. He was a loyal friend, but he couldn’t possibly approve of Tess’s refusal to cooperate with a homicide investigation.

“Mike Collins is one of three feds who’s spent a lot of time in the past ten days trying to get that information out of me. Dalesio was one of the others, and the third is an FBI agent, Barry Jenkins.”

“I knew Barry Jenkins on his first pass through Baltimore. He’s a good guy.”

“Okay, sure.” Tess had no desire to argue this point. It was Collins she feared, not Jenkins, who was probably in the dark as well. She assumed that photo of Whitman had been meant for him, or someone else familiar with Collins’s life story. “But keep all this in mind, Tull. If anything happens-to me, to Crow, to our…um, friend-remember this conversation, okay? Remember that I tried to tell you.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Tess. You’re talking about a DEA agent and a longtime FBI guy. They don’t go around killing civilians, much less assistant U.S. attorneys. Hell, the DEA and the FBI don’t even work together under normal circumstances. They got no use for each other.”

“If you say so. But if I bring…my source to you, can you offer true protection? Can you guarantee anyone’s safety?”

Tull paused, all the answer Tess needed. “It’s hard, Tess. Put aside your whole conspiracy theory. This kid is afraid because he’s double-crossed a drug dealer, right? Unless he’s got family someplace well outside Baltimore, unless he’s willing to stay off the streets, I’d be a liar if I promised anything.”

“That’s what I thought. What if I can bring you proof that Collins is connected to all of this?”

“Whatta you got?”

“I’ll tell you in an hour.”

32

The police had come and gone at Gabe Dalesio’s rental house, which was what Tess was counting on. If time hadn’t been at a premium, she would have hunted down the landlord and talked her way in, used one of her official-looking ID cards. “Death inspector” for the state medical examiner’s office was good. So was any kind of public-utility business card, which allowed her to claim reports of a gas or carbon monoxide leak. But it was past 7:30 P.M., and she didn’t want to waste time trying to track down the registered owner of this property on Hanover Street. Even if she did find the landlord, he could turn out to be an out-of-town investor who used a local property-management firm. More time wasted.

And with the sky still light, thanks to daylight savings time, breaking and entering wasn’t the best option. So Tess decided to go straight at it, knocking on a neighbor’s door and asking if he had a spare key.

“I’m a friend of Gabe’s family…”

“From Jersey?”

“Yes.” It was amazing, the information that people would plant in a well-timed pause, then give one credit for knowing. “They want me to go into the apartment, make sure certain things are there. The police”-she wiggled her fingers-“don’t always leave things as they found them.”

“I saw the cops. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but…it’s him, right? The guy killed in Canton?”

The neighbor was in his late twenties or early thirties, an aging frat-boy type with a paunch. His shock at his neighbor’s death had been dulled by a beer-bred complacency. Again, perfect for Tess’s needs. An older, more vigilant neighbor would have been inclined toward hard-nosed skepticism, while a young woman would have been outside her charm range. This was her optimum demographic for manipulation. Tess nodded, eyes downcast.

“The thing is, Gabe had my keys, but he never gave me his. He was kinda paranoid.”

Shit. “Darn.”

“But you know what? I bet you could get into his place via the roof.”

“The roof?”

“We both got decks. You go up through mine and cross over. It’s no big deal. We do it all the time. You hear about those barge parties people have on lakes? We have, like, roof parties running most of the block.”

Rooftop decks were a divisive feature in South Baltimore, beloved by the newcomers, decried by the preservationists. Suddenly Tess was all for them. Her new best friend led her through a house notable only for the smell of mildewing laundry and the large-screen televisions in at least three of the rooms she glimpsed. Once on his deck, he seemed prepared to follow her over the railing and into Gabe’s house, but she persuaded him that it would be better if she were alone, in case any official authority questioned her presence there. “I’m a friend of the family, but if I take someone else in with me, I become just another burglar.”

He sent her off with a cheerful, vigorous wave, as if she was going on an ocean voyage, and Tess clambered from his deck to Gabe’s. The door was locked, but flimsy. Not so flimsy, however, that she could force it with her weight. She was about to summon help from her new best friend when she saw the window overlooking the deck. There was the tiniest gap at the bottom, which meant it wasn’t locked. She knocked out the screen, lifted the sash, and climbed into what proved to be Gabe’s home office.

His desk was covered with stacks and stacks of paper, but orderly. Her eyes fell first on a notebook, its lined pages covered with the same sentence over and over again: I will be a Supreme Court justice. I will be a Supreme Court justice. He had been writing this up to twenty times a day for months, apparently, the poor dumb mook. Her gaze then fell upon her own name, on a chart: T. Monaghan. There was also P. Monaghan, J. Monaghan, K. Monaghan (Kitty had not taken Tyner’s last name upon marriage, bless her). E. Ransome-that was Crow, of course. Each name had been inked in a different color. If she hadn’t been the target, she would have studied and admired this impeccable organization. Tess had thought she was pretty good at charting and delineating her projects, but Gabe Dalesio made her look like a rank amateur.

The color scheme was mirrored, she realized, in the Post-its fluttering like banners from various stacks of paper. She glanced back to the chart-Crow was yellow. There were at least a dozen yellow flags, and the first one she grabbed was a statement from a brokerage firm up in Towson. A million dollars. More than a million dollars, invested in a mutual fund whose acronym meant nothing to Tess. For a moment she was swamped with doubt and fear. Where could this money have come from? But it was a legal account, not a secret safe-deposit box. And the feds hadn’t bothered to taunt her with this information. Crow’s money wasn’t the issue, not as far as they were concerned.

She needed to be systematic, logical. She pulled every piece of paper with a yellow Post-it, even those with other colors attached. Here was her father’s liquor license, which had been triple-flagged in yellow, pink, and green, and scored with exclamation marks. A name had been circled in those three colors as well, Ed Keyes. Tess had never known that Keyes held the Point’s license before it was transferred to her father, but she wasn’t surprised. Spike had not been much of one for legalities, much less the kind of sucking up that helped a man get a liquor license. Other yellows held brief dossiers on Crow’s parents, but no excited punctuation.

She searched for another triple flag and found the articles of incorporation for her business. How could this be of interest? Were they so desperate for leverage on her that they had hoped to find she was operating without a proper license?

Another multicolored circle, another series of !!!-next to Ed Keyes’s name.

An interesting overlap, but why would it matter to Gabe Dalesio unless Ed was a crook, and Tess, although she had never met her nominal partner, doubted that. Her Uncle Spike had sworn by the former cop’s loyalty, his reliability.

Uncle Spike. Crow, working in Spike’s old bar, might have called the old man for help in getting out of town. And Spike could have sent him to Ed, his old reliable. Did that mean Crow was with Ed, or simply that Ed had helped him hide somewhere else? That would explain the exclamation marks, which appeared nowhere else in Gabe Dalesio’s notes.

Tess took out her cell and a business card she had saved despite being sure that she would never use it.

“I’m ready to meet,” she told Barry Jenkins. “I’m ready to talk, to tell you everything. But it has to be tonight.”

“Really?” he said. “I guess that can be arranged.”

“And it has to be in public. A restaurant or a bar.”

“Just name the place and the time.”

“My dad’s bar on Franklintown Road. Ten-thirty.”

“That’s kind of late for an old man. Can we do this tomorrow?”

“No.” She modulated her voice. “Tonight. Tonight or I’ll let the Beacon-Light have it first.”

“I thought they were more intent on protecting the source than you are.”

“I have his permission to go public if I think it’s necessary to protect his safety.”

“His, huh? You must be ready to identify him, throwing the big secret of his gender around.”

“Ten-thirty,” she said. “All of you-Collins and Dalesio.” She was just a citizen. There was no reason she would know that Dalesio was dead.

“I can’t guarantee anyone but myself.”

“All of you or it’s no deal.”

“Ten-thirty, your father’s bar.”

She hung up, satisfied she had the only thing that mattered-a head start. She began trying to call Crow as soon as she was on the highway, then continued at ten-minute intervals, only to be bounced into voice mail every time.

Crow was falling asleep on the sofa while Lloyd was trying to coax something watchable out of the black-and-white television that Ed had bequeathed to them. After clicking back and forth between the Delmarva Peninsula’s two channels, he gave up in disgust, popping in one of the videos they had checked out from the library, The Hot Rock. Tired as he was, Crow found himself drawn into the film, an old favorite. He loved the shambling, low-key quality of seventies films, the small stakes, the human scale. True, Redford was all wrong for Dortmunder, but his miscasting didn’t hurt the film. Thinking of Westlake made Crow think of The Grifters. Would Lloyd like that? Should Lloyd like that? Wasn’t John Cusack’s character named Lloyd? No, it was Roy. Would Lloyd appreciate Grosse Point Blank? Crow’s brain was soup tonight.

“A hundred thousand dollars for five guys,” Lloyd said in disbelief as the caper took shape. “That’s crazy.”

“Lloyd, you made yourself an accessory to murder for two hundred, a sandwich, a pair of shoes, and a jacket. Oh, and a DVD player for your buddy.”

“I was gonna get my mama some earrings, too,” Lloyd said. “But it was crowded at the Hecht’s counter.”

It was the first time that Lloyd had ever spoken of his mother voluntarily. Perhaps the experience with the Anderson family yesterday was making him wistful for home. Crow decided to mine that vein of feeling, play on those emotions to see if Lloyd could be persuaded to go back.

“You miss your mom?”

“She okay.”

“Yeah, but do you miss her?”

An adolescent shrug.

“You want to call her?”

“Thought we couldn’t tell people where we are.”

“I’m getting rid of the cell phones every forty-eight hours, remember? Besides, no one’s going to be coming around to talk to your mother, much less get up on her phone, unless they figure out who you are. And there are only four people who know that. Me, Tess, and the two reporters.”

“And that crazy blond bitch with the cookies.”

Normally Crow would have reproved Lloyd’s careless misogyny, but the description of Whitney wasn’t that far off base. She was a bit of a bitch. In a good way. Whitney’s WASP bitchery was a kind of superpower, one that had extricated Tess out of many a jam-and gotten her into almost as many.

“Here, call.” He handed Lloyd the cell phone and paused the film on the wonderfully anguished face of Paul Sand as he swallowed the diamond.

Lloyd punched, listened, punched the number in again. “Phone’s dead. Lost the charge already. You gotta stop buying this cheap shit.”

“Dead?” Crow took the phone and examined it. “No problem, it’ll work while plugged in to the charger.”

Lloyd punched in the number, listened poker-faced.

“Number disconnected.”

“Try information. Maybe she changed it.”

“Phones get disconnected,” Lloyd said.

“I thought your father-”

“Stepfather.”

“Yeah, I thought he was pretty, um, together. Steady.”

“Even people with jobs get their phones cut off. It’s the easy one to let go, this time of year.”

“This time of year?”

“Still too cool to let the gas and ’lectric get turned off, especially with all those kids. Plus, Murray’s got a cell, so they can get by without the home phone.”

“Call on Murray’s phone.”

“I don’t wanna waste my time trying to get past him. He’s big on questions. My mama will get the phone turned back on next month, probably.”

There was no recrimination in Lloyd’s tone, no self-pity. He spoke of the world he knew as casually as Crow might speak of playing Little League in Charlottesville or going to Luray Caverns on field trips.

“Hey, you get Internet access on this phone,” Lloyd said. “You know that?”

“Probably costs an arm and a leg to access it.”

“Everything cost, man.”

“True. Hey-see if you can get that e-mail from Tess. The one with the photos attached.”

It was as if technology were Lloyd’s second language, Crow marveled. A week ago he hadn’t known what instant messaging was. Now he quickly opened three e-mails from Tess, each with a photo attachment. “White dude,” he said, showing Crow a photo of a youngish man. “Old white dude.” A middle-aged man. “Brother-Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothin’.” Lloyd’s face was closing down, his eyes slanting sideways.

“Lloyd. No more secrets. You agreed.”

“I know this guy. Well, I don’t know him, but I seen him. He’s the guy who gave Le’andro the card.”

“You always said Le’andro gave you the card, that you didn’t know where he got it from.”

Lloyd shifted uncomfortably. “I thought we’d all be safer if I left that part out.”

“You were supposed to tell us everything, Lloyd. That was the deal-no lies, no omissions.”

“I know,” Lloyd said. “But I didn’t know the guy, and he doesn’t know I was there. I was hiding. Le’andro didn’t want him to know that he was going to contract it out, you know? So I stayed in the car when he went for the meeting, but I could see them in the rearview mirror. Didn’t seem no harm to it.”

“You’re saying this guy is connected to Gregory Youssef’s murder?”

“I’m saying he had the card and the code, and he told Le’andro what to do with it. I didn’t know him. Bennie Tep told Le’andro to do him a favor, no big deal. We thought this guy was from New York or Philly. He didn’t dress like anyone special, and his car was really shitty. He looked trifling.”

“Lloyd, this is a DEA agent. This is one of the guys who’s been trying to get your name out of Tess ever since the article appeared. Tess thought it was because the feds want you as a witness, but he may just want you.”

“Shit.”

Lloyd’s face was as frozen in desperation as Paul Sand’s, although Crow didn’t find it the least bit comic.

“I’m going to call Ed,” he said. “He’s a former cop. Maybe he knows someone over here who can take us in, protect us.”

Ed’s phone rang and rang, and Crow had a moment of wondering where he could be at ten o’clock. No answering machine either. How typically Ed. But he picked up on the eighth ring, and his voice sounded sharp, not as if he had been asleep or outside.

“Ed, it’s Crow. I think Lloyd and I need to turn ourselves in to someone, but someone we can absolutely trust. Definitely not anyone in the DEA or the FBI. Do you have any contacts in the department back in Baltimore, anyone you can vouch for-”

“Wrong number,” Ed said.

“Ed, it’s Crow-”

“I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong number. You call here again, I’m gonna Star 69 your ass, turn you over to the local cops. You hear me? The local cops, the Delaware state troopers up to Rehoboth. You think they’re small-time, but they’ll know what to do with your punk ass. I’m sick of this shit.”

He’s giving me instructions, Crow realized-and maybe risking his own life in the process.

33

“Was that him?” Barry Jenkins asked when Ed Keyes hung up the phone.

“Was that who?”

“Edgar Ransome-the young white man who’s traveling with a young black man who happens to be a person of interest in the murder of a federal prosecutor. You’ve practically been harboring a fugitive, Mr. Keyes. How did a former cop get mixed up in something like this?”

Jenkins and Collins had arrived at Keyes’s trailer-park address just after ten. It had been Collins who pointed out that it would look weird, calling in sick and then going to arrest the suspect in the Youssef case. This way they could say honestly that they’d followed up on a lead that Dalesio had shared with Collins before he died. But Jenkins always forgot how long it took to cover the 130 miles between Baltimore and the Delaware beaches, even in the off-season. The first hour flew by, making you cocky, but then came Delaware and the long, dark stretch of 404, a two-lane road where one stubborn farmer could bring the average speed down to forty-five miles per hour. At night the landscape seemed desolate and eerie, the kind of countryside where people broke down in horror films. And Collins, so bold in every other respect, was restrained behind the wheel of a car. That probably came from a lifetime of DWB.

They could have left earlier, but Jenkins wanted to go through the motions, walk through the steps that they would later claim to have taken. One less lie to keep track of. They had even gone by Gabe’s house, although they didn’t need to go in. After all, Gabe had already told Collins what they needed to know-the name of the likely contact, his address over in Delaware. They were almost to the Bay Bridge when that cunt called, suddenly ready to play, and Jenkins had agreed to meet her rather than let her know that he was nowhere nearby. She wouldn’t be the first woman he’d stood up.

Once they arrived in Fenwick, they had decided not to go straight to the ex-cop’s trailer. They chatted up some neighbors in the trailer park. They were skeptical types, but again official ID and badges worked wonders, and they eventually loosened the jaw of one old biddy, who had noticed a strange young man hanging around.

“White or black?” Jenkins had asked.

The woman had cast a nervous look toward Collins, as if unsure of the propriety of referencing race in his presence.

“Why, white,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “He sat outside and drank a beer with Ed on Sunday, bold as you please.”

Bold because it was Sunday, because it was beer? Jenkins wasn’t sure of her logic.

“You get a name, or any information about him?”

“I think Ed said he’s a seasonal worker, helping him out at the park.”

“The park?”

“You know, the place he runs down to the boardwalk.”

Of course Jenkins didn’t know. But she volunteered the info eventually, in her own scattered way. So while Jenkins was sitting with Ed Keyes, sharing a beer with him and trying to get him to open up about his “seasonal worker,” Mike Collins was already en route to FunWorld to make his acquaintance.

Then the phone rang. Jenkins wasn’t fooled. He knew what the old guy was trying to do-but he also knew he was too late. Collins probably would have shot the old guy, but Jenkins was trying to do this right for once.

Mike Collins sat parked outside the shuttered amusement park, trying to figure out where all the entrances were. Fearlessness had always been his greatest strength-and his largest liability. He never doubted that he could outrun, outshoot, outfight anyone. Outthink? No. But in any physical contest, he would win.

But that was in Baltimore, on occasion Prince George’s County, places where it was never truly dark. Off-season, the town of Fenwick sat in inky blackness, clouds blotting out whatever light the stars might have provided tonight. The ocean, which Collins could hear but not see, should have been a comfort. Wherever they went, they couldn’t go east. That was one direction he didn’t have to worry about. Still, it bothered him, this unknown territory. He saw only one door, in the center of a clown’s leering mouth, but what about all those garage-type entrances? He had to get the kid now or risking losing him, losing everything.

Just the kid, Jenkins had said over and over, as if Collins were stupid. Just the kid. Take him into custody, and we’ll stage our final act out on the road. Jenkins’s idea was that they would stop for a bathroom break somewhere, or so they would tell folks later on. That lonely stretch of 404, the bypass around Bridgeville. The kid would demand a chance to whiz on the side of the road, and Jenkins would join him, then the kid would go for Jenkins’s gun, and Mike would have to shoot him. Would they throw down the knife, too, or was that overkill? Collins was fuzzy on that part.

Just the kid.

Well, he’d do his best.

He eased out of the car and positioned himself in a doorway opposite the side entrance to the amusement park. Could they raise those big shutters? Not quickly, he guessed, and not without a lot of noise, chains rattling and shit. Damn, he wished he knew the layout of the place inside. Maybe he should wait for Jenkins so they could control for someone trying to go out the windows. Maybe-

But here they were. Two men, about the same height and build, moving silently and quickly toward an old Jeep. He was on them before the driver was in the car, his gun in the guy’s back. Normally he would have roared, too, used the adrenaline-fueled bluster he’d been trained to employ in such situations. But it was almost as if the guy expected him. His hands went up in automatic surrender. A civilian, as Jenkins had predicted. A candy-ass.

“Mike Collins?” the man asked.

“Yes,” he said automatically even as he thought, How? How do you know my name? The girlfriend, shit, the girlfriend-

“Run, Lloyd!” the man screamed. “Run!”

And the boy took off toward the ocean of all places, ran toward the sound of that angry surf. Surprised, then furious, Collins caught the man across the face with his weapon, then hit him again, and he would have kept going if he hadn’t remembered that the man, infuriating as he was, wasn’t the quarry. Just the kid, Jenkins had said. Should he finish the man off, was he still off-limits? No, he had to chase and catch the kid. He’d have to do the throw-down on his own. Jenkins would understand.

The kid had a good head start, and it took Mike a moment to realize he’d have to shuck his shoes if he wanted to be competitive on this wet sand and surf. Still, the kid was just a runt and a slacker, underfed and underexercised. He had no chance. The distance between them was closing, and the stretch of beach ahead was increasingly desolate. Mike wouldn’t even try to catch him until they got past that last line of houses, where he could be sure that they were alone, unseen.

Lloyd thought briefly about Crow’s advice that he should learn to swim. If he could get out in the ocean, would he be safer? Guy was a brother, maybe he couldn’t swim either. Too late now, and he’d freeze to death in that water anyway. His lungs were on fire, his legs felt like lead, churning in the sand, but he had to keep going, not daring to look back. He was pretty sure that cops, even dirty cops, couldn’t shoot you in the back. Someone had told him that. Who?

Le’andro. Fuck.

He wished he could take it back, every bit of it. Rewind his life as if it were a video, go to that night before Thanksgiving. No, Le’andro, I can’t help you out. No, Le’andro, I’m not going to hide here and listen to what this guy tells you to do, then do it for you.

Two hundred dollars and a North Face jacket. Crow was right. It was a piss-poor payment for one’s life.

The houses seem to be giving way, disappearing. He was now on an open stretch of beach, and he could hear that guy grunting behind him, steady as the Terminator. Crow was wrong. He shouldn’t have run. Guy might not have killed him in front of a witness, but he’d sure as hell do it out here in the middle of nowhere. Crow was just protecting his own ass, maybe, like in Robocop, where all those guys keep running from the guy that the machine had targeted for assassination. Fuck Crow. Fuck everybody. Lloyd could sense the other man gaining on him, and he was beginning to think he couldn’t go another step when light flooded the open beach and that pathetic ugly Jeep crested the dunes just ahead of him.

Crow hadn’t abandoned him after all. But what could Crow do anyway?

Crow’s nose was broken, he was pretty sure of that, and something felt off in his cheek. Whatever had happened, it was the worst pain he had ever known, worse even than being stabbed, because at least then he had gone into shock, been beyond pain.

Still, he knew he had to get to Lloyd. He didn’t even take time to deflate the Jeep’s tires, not caring if it got stuck in the sand. The thing was to get there, to be present, to bank on the fact that a witness would take the air out of this scheme. He raced up the stretch of Highway 1, wishing that the summer speed traps were there so he could lead them into the chase, pulled into the parking lot of the public beach, and then rammed up the path used by the surf fishers. His headlamps picked up two running figures. The one in front looked ragged, on the verge of collapse, while the other moved with a brisk, confident stride.

“Stop!” he screamed. “We’ll come with you together! We’ll both-”

To his amazement, the man on the beach turned and fired straight at him, hitting the Jeep. The lights probably made it hard for him to aim with any accuracy, but now he was approaching, coming toward the Jeep’s side, his weapon drawn. And for the first time in his life, Crow understood that he was in danger, that he could be killed. Lloyd, yes. Lloyd, sure. Lloyd, of course. He had been protecting Lloyd all along. Lloyd was vulnerable because he was the kind of disposable kid whose death no one would notice, as long as it was under the right circumstances. But not him. People like Crow didn’t get killed, not by cops, no matter how crooked and desperate.

Yet here was a man approaching him with a gun, a man who was going to shoot him and then Lloyd. How would he explain it? Crow backed away, moving behind the car, but it seemed unlikely that they could maintain this game of ring-around-the-rosy, like in some old retro movie where the boss chased the comely secretary around the desk.

“You can’t,” he shouted to Mike Collins. “It’s over. You can’t-”

Yet the man’s very posture made clear that he could, that he would. Crow bent down and grabbed a handful of sand, flung it in Collins’s face. It wasn’t clear if he hit his eyes as he had hoped, but Collins flinched instinctively, and it was all Crow needed. He dove into the Jeep and grabbed the gun he’d taken from Tess, the.38 Smith amp; Wesson that she retired when she bought her Beretta. Lloyd, as if sensing his plan, threw himself on Collins from behind, knocking him down in the sand. Like a child, at once single-minded and unfocused, Collins turned his attention on Lloyd, pushing him off, positioning himself in the sand, taking a two-handed grip on his gun and aiming straight at Lloyd’s forehead.

“Don’t!” It was unclear if the man could hear, if he ever heard, if he understood anything other than his own need to survive. Lloyd closed his eyes, surrendering, ready to die.

Lloyd opened them again at the sound of the gunshot, watched in seeming amazement as Collins crumpled. Crow, who hadn’t handled a weapon since he earned a merit badge in riflery, had made the first shot count, because he knew this was not a night for second chances.

Jenkins wasn’t surprised when he heard the knock at Ed’s trailer door. He had been expecting Mike to come back and tell him the boy was safely in tow, that they needed to head back. In fact, he wasn’t sure why it had taken this long.

He was surprised to see the two men he’d been searching for. They had become abstract to him, somehow, objects, one with a name and one without. He knew the one face, from driver’s-license databases, although it had been far more handsome in that official photo, without the nose bloodied and crooked.

“Call the police,” Crow said to Ed. “And then I need to call a lawyer.”

“Did you…?”

“I can’t talk to you. You’re FBI, right? Barry Jenkins. Tess sent us pictures of you. Are you crooked, too? Were you part of this?”

Jenkins took out his service weapon.

“Shit,” Ed said. “Give it up, man. It’s over.”

Jenkins could blame it all on Collins, of course. Pretend ignorance. Say he’d been duped as everyone else had, that it was Youssef’s plan and Collins had killed him. That had been built into the equation from the beginning. No one could link Barry Jenkins to anything directly-not Bennie Tep, not Youssef, no one. True, he’d been there the night Youssef died, driven behind Collins up the highway to the turnpike exit where they dumped the car, and the very setup suggested an accomplice. But no one could prove it was him. Except Collins.

“Is he dead?”

The boyfriend, what’s-his-name, considered the question and nodded.

“How?”

“I’d prefer to wait for the local police and an attorney before I say anything else.” Even now the old man was moving toward the phone. Like Jenkins gave a shit.

Jenkins pointed his gun at the boy. “Tell me your name.”

“I’m calling 911,” the old cop roared, grabbing the phone. “Don’t think that I won’t.”

“Just your name. That’s all I want. Tell me who you are.”

“Lloyd Jupiter,” the boy whispered. He was trembling, the little shit.

Jenkins thought fleetingly of going outside. But Jenkins was afraid he would lose his nerve if he took another step, and he was determined to do the right thing, the honorable thing, as awful as it was.

“Lloyd Jupiter,” he echoed.

With that, Barry Jenkins nodded, put his weapon in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

MAY
34

“I almost made it,” Tess says to me, perhaps for the twentieth time. It’s something of a sore point.

“Almost,” I agree, crushing the Metro section of the Beacon-Light into a ball and tossing it into a trash can. Two men were killed in Baltimore yesterday, their deaths dutifully reported on page B-3. Meanwhile City Man is on the cover of the Maryland section again, arrested by federal agents for alleged ties to terrorists.

In other words, in the immortal words of the Talking Heads-same as it ever was. But Tess can’t let go of that night in particular, or the past in general. That’s what makes her a true Baltimorean.

“The thing is, there’s this sign, at the intersection of 26 and 20, tells you to go right to Fenwick? But 20 takes you around to the south end. I would have been better off going through Bethany and then heading down the coastal highway. And I still got there before the Delaware police, although not before…’’

“Uh-huh.”

We’re sitting on the steps of Holy Redeemer, as we’ve done every Monday, hoping to get lucky. The afternoon lunch service has just started, and the line is long, because Holy Redeemer is serving chicken and word travels fast. People come from as far as West Baltimore on Chicken Day.

“I mean, I thought it out. I had a plan. They were going to be in Baltimore, waiting for me, while I went and got you. I kept trying to call you, too, just in case anyone beat me there-but your goddamn cell phone was off.”

“It lost the charge.”

“Whatever. All that folderol with the phones, and do you realize we never once spoke on them? That they were off, or out of range, or out of juice-”

“I know, Tess. I overthought it.”

It isn’t-for once-that she has to prove she’s right. Tess needs absolution. She feels bad about my nose, which is healing just fine with no damage to the sinuses, and that’s all I care about. It isn’t quite as straight as it once was, but I like the bump. Makes me look like more of a tough guy. It was just that night, seeing me all bloody and fucked up in Ed’s trailer, that threw Tess. She came galloping in, gun drawn, not even two minutes after Jenkins killed himself, frantic because she recognized the boxy sedan parked outside. Now you know how it feels, I wanted to say.

And I know how she felt, so it all evens out.

My nose is just a portion of Tess’s guilt. She thinks this is all her fault. If she hadn’t decided to track down Lloyd and force him to tell what he knew about Greg Youssef, none of this-the deaths of Gabe Dalesio and Le’andro Watkins-would have happened. But if I hadn’t brought Lloyd home in the first place…if Lloyd hadn’t slashed my tire…if I hadn’t borrowed the Lexus that day because the brakes on my Volvo were squishy…if I hadn’t concealed my inheritance from Tess, making it difficult to explain to her how I could afford to fix my squishy brakes. The bottom line is, if it doesn’t snow on that particular Monday in March, none of this happens. But it did, and it has, and that’s that. We’ll keep circling back to the subject again and again, each making the case for our central role. My fault. No, my fault. But I also know that there is as much ego as guilt in this argument, and time will wear it down. Eventually. If you think about it, Tess and I actually came in at the end of this story. The people who should feel guilty aren’t alive. And I don’t think Mike Collins ever felt much of anything, although there was something akin to remorse and sorrow in Barry Jenkins’s face that night.

The question is whether he felt it for himself and the failure of his grand scheme or for the people who had died because of it. I suppose it could have been both.

Strange to say, the worst part of the whole ordeal wasn’t that night on the beach, when I at least had adrenaline on my side. The scary part was the three days when I was held for the death of Mike Collins. Killing a DEA agent is serious stuff, even if you can persuasively make the case that he was going to execute an innocent kid in front of your eyes, even if you had good reason to think he was going to kill you as well. No one believes in law and order more than those charged with keeping it, and things were rough for Lloyd and me those first seventy-two hours in Delaware. But Tess’s call to Martin Tull proved helpful, along with the information about how hard Jenkins and Collins had pressed her for Lloyd’s name. Turns out Jenkins had wormed his way into the Youssef investigation, but Collins had no official role, and it was beyond bizarre that an FBI agent and a DEA agent were working together. Nothing to get a bureaucracy’s attention like the flouting of its own precious rules.

And when investigators started discovering the assets in the two agents’ names, it began to come together. Wilma was the one who delineated it for us, who saw how easy it would be for federal agents to blackmail a drug dealer who was at no risk of indictment. They were stickup men with badges instead of guns. Wilma made a semiclean breast of things, telling investigators she had found fifty thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in her husband’s name. “Triple that,” Tess told me, but she kept still. Me, I think that Wilma’s motive wasn’t greed so much as spin. The smaller the amount, the more likely it was that her dead husband was a blackmailer instead of a full-fledged coconspirator. It may seem like a silly distinction, but I’m not going to begrudge her that. We all need certain myths to get by.

“Are you going to tell Lloyd about the money?” Tess asks me. “Your money, I mean.”

“First I just want to find him.”

Secrets are corrosive. Remember that. Oh, I suppose it’s okay to conceal birthday gifts and Christmas and other pleasant surprises, but every other deception leads to rot. If I had told Tess about my inheritance when I came into the trust at the beginning of this year, then it wouldn’t have mushroomed into such a big deal. But I hated the money, loathed the very thought of it. It was blood money twice over, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak of it.

The first part of the story, Tess knew. Years ago my grandfather had disinherited my mother for running off with my father. Grandfather-and it was always “Grandfather,” nothing shorter or sweeter-saw money as a cudgel, a whip, a means of control. He thought he could bend my mother to his will with it. Much to his surprise, my mother was perfectly happy with her life as a professor’s wife. But after I was born, she sent me to her father in the summers, an olive branch of sorts, an indication that she was willing to make amends if he would meet her halfway. Unfortunately, my grandfather saw me as another weapon, another way to punish my mother. He made me heir to a trust that she had to administer, thinking that would shame and hurt her. My mother didn’t mind, but I did. I hated being a pawn in the old man’s game.

And that was before my mother told me last fall, just before I came into the trust, that it was time I knew the origins of the family’s fortunes.

“Whaling,” I said. “Grandfather never shut up about it.” My Nantucket summers had included a lot of briefings on my ancestors.

“Whaling in the nineteenth century,” she said. “But earlier, in the eighteenth…well, they had started with a very different kind of cargo.”

“Oh.”

Growing up in Charlottesville, I had gone to schools with various Lees and Jacksons and Stuarts, marveled at classmates who actually looked forward to joining the Sons of the Confederacy. I always wondered how they lived with their family’s legacies. And now it turned out my own history was just as complex. A million dollars. Did time wash money clean of its sins? Was I culpable for my ancestors’ moral relativism, in which the men enabled the slave trade and the women then protested it, achieving some kind of karmic equipoise? And wasn’t I guilty of the same kind of hypocrisy, giving it away a dollar a time but not ready to relinquish it whole? My very approach to philanthropy was cavalier, ill-conceived. My Monday-morning food drive, which recycles food from area bars and restaurants? Pure bullshit. I drive down to the wholesale market in Jessup and buy what I think the soup kitchens can use. Without me there is no Chicken Day at Holy Redeemer. I was straddling, too.

Charlotte Curtis, the director at Holy R, says Lloyd is in the wind again. He tried to go home, but it was the old Thomas Wolfe story. Within days he and Murray had clashed and he was back to his old life-scamming, loafing, scrounging. Lloyd turns seventeen this summer, and he missed most of tenth grade. How can anyone reasonably expect to help Lloyd if he won’t help himself?

The thing is, I’m not particularly reasonable. So I’m sitting on the steps of Holy Redeemer hoping against hope that Lloyd shows up. It’s Chicken Day, after all. Chicken and mashed potatoes and bags of Otterbein cookies to go. How could anyone stay away? In fact, Charlotte thinks I overdid it a little. But I keep thinking Lloyd will come, especially after Tess sees Dub, Terrell, and Tourmaline leaving with the red-and-white bags of gingersnaps clutched in their hands. They stop, exchanging cautious greetings, but when Tess begins, “If there’s anything I can do-” Dub waves her off.

“We fine,” he says. And he will be. Like the genetic marvels that emerge from inner-city neighborhoods to play pro sports, Dub was born with something extra. He’ll make it out through sheer will and intelligence. Lloyd, on the other hand…

Go figure, he comes in just under the wire, getting in line at one minute before four. He sees us, but he’s clearly anxious for his food, so we hang back, letting him go inside and eat. He must inhale it, because he’s back out in under ten minutes, Miss Charlotte locking the door behind him. Last man standing.

“Hey, Lloyd.”

“Hey.” A beat. “Crow.” I can’t tell if he’s forgotten my name or isn’t sure he wants to grant me that much intimacy. He blames me for Delaware. Nothing really bad happened to him while we were detained, but he was terrified every minute of it, and he begrudges my knowing this. But that was a month ago, and with no evidence to lead the federal authorities back to Bennie Tep or any other local drug dealer, Lloyd’s in the clear. The only person he could identify, in the end, was Mike Collins. In Howard County the death of Greg Youssef is a closed case.

In Baltimore City the death of Le’andro Watkins remains open, probably forever, and the only person who cares is Rainier, stuck with another stone-cold whodunit.

“How you doing, Lloyd?”

“Things’re cool,” he says, taking a few steps backward. Maybe he thinks we’re going to grab him and throw him in a car again.

“You know, there was a reward…”

“Ummmm.” He’s still moving backward.

“It was supposed to be for information leading to the arrest of Youssef’s killers, but they decided we’re entitled to it. Tess, me. You.”

This gets his attention. “Yeah? How much?”

“Here’s the thing: Because you’re a minor, I’m going to hold your share in trust. To get it you have to go through me.”

“Shit.” He makes it two syllables. “That’s just a way of saying you’re never going to give it to me.”

“No, I’m going to safeguard your share. It’s not a lot of money, Lloyd, but it’s enough. Enough to go to college, even set you up in your own apartment. Buy a car, assuming you ever get a license. But I am allowed to set conditions.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Condition number one: you’re going to work this summer. At FunWorld. Room and board, plus two hundred sixty-five dollars a week.”

“Fuck, I already done that.”

“Did you hear me? There’s a wage this time.”

“Slave wages.”

That makes my skin jump. But there will be time enough, as Prufrock learned, to tell Lloyd my secrets. After all, Lloyd hasn’t always been forthcoming with me. “During the summer the dormitories will be filled with kids your age. And Mrs. Anderson, that nice lady who helped you out? She said she’ll make sure you get to church every Sunday. And you get a bonus if you stay the whole summer. You’ll come home with over two thousand dollars, if you don’t blow it on fried dough and saltwater taffy.”

“Then what?”

Good question.

“Your choice-back to school or you start tutoring for your GED. Then college or a job. The trust will be used for essential costs. But if you keep up your end of the bargain, you’ll come out of school with no debt and a nice lump sum to start your life.”

Lloyd stops moving backward, but everything in his posture suggests that he still wants to cut and run, get away from me. He likes his life just the way it is, or thinks he does. He can’t imagine what else it would be, so he has to pretend he’s happy.

“When I got to start?”

“Most of the kids begin after school lets out. But since you’re not enrolled-this semester-Ed could use you starting Mother’s Day weekend. In fact, he says your whole family could come down, spend the weekend.”

“Even Murray?”

“Even Murray,” I say, knowing it’s not what he’s hoping to hear.

“And where do I live when I come back? Not with you?” The idea clearly horrifies him. Give Tess credit: It horrifies her more, but she doesn’t let it show.

“We’ll work something out, maybe rent a place that you can share with Dub and his people. But it would be my name on the lease, so you’d have to live according to my rules.”

“Rules,” Lloyd said, his voice crackling with contempt. “School. Books and shit. Like all the answers are written down someplace and all I have to do is learn them.”

“Yep.”

“I’ll think on it.” He takes a few steps forward, shakes my hand. Then he ambles away before I can find out how to get in touch with him, where to find him. As Miss Charlotte said, Lloyd Jupiter’s in the wind these days, aiming to please no one but himself.

“Go ahead,” I say to Tess, who’s clearly bursting to say something. “Tell me I’m crazy. Tell me I’m a fool for trying, for caring.”

“It was easier to save his life one night than it will be over the long haul,” Tess said. “But you already know that. You’ve always known that.”

Miss Charlotte comes out, locking the door behind her. “Did you see Lloyd?”

“Yeah.”

“I wasn’t sure, because he gave me something to give to you.”

She pulls out Tess’s unicorn box and hands it to her. Tess starts to open it, then thinks better of it. She passes it to me instead, and I shake it gently. Hollow, not even a seed swishing inside. Nobody’s perfect.

“Do you think,” I ask Tess, “that it’s a good sign? Or does this mean he’s through with us entirely and doesn’t want any unfinished business between us?”

She traces the crooked line of my nose with her index finger. At some point the face of one’s beloved becomes so familiar as to be abstract. What does she see? What do I see? Is Tess pretty? Are her features even? I don’t know. All I can absorb are the expressions that play across the surface, the amazing nuance. In this instance there is mockery, yes, the impression that she’s always amused by me. But there is sympathy, too, a shared weakness for lost causes. Sadness and respect for the bond we now share. I finally understand that when Tess fingers her scar, it’s not because she’s scared but because she wants to remind herself that she has what it takes to survive.

She touches my scar and concedes the melancholy bond between us. My grandfather arbitrarily established that my life as an adult would start on my twenty-sixth birthday, December 15. But I know it began on April 5, on a deserted stretch of beach north of Fenwick, Delaware. Not because I killed a man but because I realized that a man could kill me, that immortality was not my birthright.

“Go for it,” she says at last. “God forbid another native should come of age not knowing who the Baltimore Four were.”

“The Oriole pitching staff of 1971, right?”

“Berrigan, Lewis, Mengel, and Eberhardt. The Customs House,1967.”

This surprises me more than anything. “I didn’t think you were listening that day.”

“Well, I was.”