What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 2

“That your phone?”

The sleep-creased woman staring at Kevin Infante was angry about something, not exactly a first for him. He also wasn’t sure of her name, although he was reasonably sure it would come to him in a second or two. Again, not a first.

No, it was the combination-a strange woman and a baleful glare-that made this morning unique in what his sergeant liked to call the annals of Infante, which the boss invariably pronounced with a long a sound. If Infante didn’t know a woman well enough to remember her name, what could he possibly have done to earn this martyred glare? He usually needed three or four months to inspire this kind of rage in a woman.

“That your phone?” the woman repeated, her voice as tight and dangerous as her expression.

“Yeah,” he said, relieved to be starting with an easy question. “Absolutely.”

It occurred to him that he should try to find the phone, perhaps even answer it, but the ringing had stopped. He waited for the landline to kick in behind the cell, then remembered he was not in his own bedroom. He fished around on the floor with his left arm, his right one still pinned beneath the woman, and found his trousers on the floor, the phone clipped to the belt. Even as he grabbed it, the phone vibrated in his hand and emitted a shrill chirp, another disgruntled scold.

“Just the office,” he said, glancing at the number.

“An emergency?” the woman asked, and if he had been more on his game, he would have lied and said yes, absolutely, that’s what it was, then gotten into his clothes and escaped.

Still sleep-fogged, he said, “There are no emergencies in my department.”

“I thought you were a cop.” He could hear the anger curdling at the edges of her words, the pent-up resentment.

“Detective.”

“Same thing, right?”

“Pretty much.”

“So don’t cops have emergencies?”

“All the time.” And this would count as one. “But in my line of work-” He stopped short of identifying himself as a murder police, fearful that she would find it too interesting and want to see him again, cultivate a relationship. There were a lot of cop groupies out there, a fact for which he was normally thankful. “The type of people I work with-they’re very patient.”

“You got, like, a desk job?”

“You could say that.” He had a desk. He had a job. Sometimes he did his job at his desk. “Debbie.” He tried not to sound too proud of himself for pulling the name up. “You could say that, Debbie.”

His eyes flicked around the room, searching for a clock but also taking in his surroundings. A bedroom, of course, and a reasonably nice one, with arty posters of flowers and what his ex-wife, the more recent one, always called a color scheme, which was supposed to be a good thing, but it never sounded right to Infante. A scheme was a plot, a plan to get away with something. But then a color scheme was part of a trap, too, if you thought about it, the one that began with a too-expensive ring, revolving credit at Shofer’s, and a mortgage payment, then ended-twice in his experience so far-in a Baltimore County courtroom, with the woman taking all the stuff and leaving all the debt. The scheme here was pale yellow and green, not in the least objectionable, but it made him feel vaguely nauseous. As he sorted his clothes from hers, he began noticing other odd details about the room, things that didn’t quite track. The built-in desk beneath the casement window, the boxy minifridge draped with a cloth, a small microwave on top of that, the pennant above the desk, extolling the Towson Wildcats…Fuck me, he thought. Fuck me.

“So,” he said. “What’s your major?”

The girl-a real girl, a true girl, a probably-under-twenty-one girl, not that anything over sixteen was off the legal menu, but Infante had some standards-gave him an icy look and crawled over him, wrapping the yellow-and-green top sheet around her. With much conspicuous effort, she pulled a fluffy robe from a hook and arrayed it over herself, allowing the sheet to fall only after belting the robe. Still, he got a quick look and remembered what had brought him there. Lord knows it wasn’t the face, although that had probably been more appealing when it wasn’t puckered up this way. In the morning light, she was too all-over pale, this Debbie, one of those egg-faced blondes whose eyes disappeared without makeup. She grabbed a bucket from the floor of the closet, prompting a split second of panicky speculation. Was she going to hit him with it? Pour something on his head? But Debbie just huffed out of the room, on her way to the showers. Presumably to wash away any trace of her evening with Kevin Infante. How bad could it have been? He decided not to wait around and find out.

It was still early by college standards, and he was almost out of the dorm before he crossed another student’s path, a plump, big-eyed girl who seemed unnerved by such an alien presence. Not just male but suited, older, so obviously not a student or even a teacher.

“Police,” he said. “ Baltimore County.”

She didn’t seem to find much comfort in this. “Has something happened?”

“No, just making a routine public-safety check. Don’t forget, lock your doors and avoid unlighted areas in parking lots.”

“Yes, Officer,” she said solemnly.

The March morning was cold, the campus desolate. He found his car in an illegal spot not far from the dorm. He had thought it was an apartment house when he tried to drop her off last night. The evening was coming back to him. He had gone to Souris ’s, in need of a change from the usual place, Wagner’s, where his coworkers went. There had been a gaggle of girls at the end of the bar, and although he’d told himself that he was just coming in for a quick drink, he soon felt compelled to cull one from the herd. He hadn’t gotten the best one, but the one he had gotten had been pretty good. Eager to please, at any rate, blowing him in his car on Allegheny Avenue. He drove her back to this dowdy-looking midrise, quiet and hushed at 2:00 A.M. It had been his intention to watch her turn her key in the lock and then beat out a quick good-bye beep on the horn, but she had clearly expected more, so he’d followed her to her room and anted up. He was pretty sure he had made a good show of it before falling asleep. So what was up with the sour puss this morning?

A campus cop was getting ready to stroke his car, but Infante flashed his badge and the guy backed off, although he was clearly itching to argue. Probably the highlight of the poor mope’s day, fighting over a ticket. He checked his cell phone-Nancy Porter, his former partner, whispering urgently into the phone, “Where are you?” Shit, he had missed roll call again. If he wanted to get to work in a reasonably timely fashion, he’d have to choose between a shower and breakfast, a real one that would settle his stomach. He decided he could handle being queasy for a few hours better than he could tolerate his own stink, so he drove to his apartment over in Northwest Baltimore. He could always claim that he had been chasing a lead on the…McGowan case, that was it. The inspiration came to him in the shower, and he stayed there longer than he should have, letting the hot water beat down on him, the night’s odors rising up from his pores. He’d been looking for the girl’s ex-boyfriend, not the most recent one, or even the one before, but three boyfriends ago. Come to think of it, that wasn’t a bad idea. The girl’s death, an old-fashioned stab-and-dump in Gunpowder Falls State Park, had a brutality to it that strangers seldom mustered. It hadn’t been enough to cut her. The killer had also set her body alight, igniting a small brush fire that had brought fire trucks to the scene, when she otherwise might have languished undiscovered for days, weeks, months. Citizens were always surprised when cops couldn’t find a body, but for all the endless development in the Baltimore metro area, there were still acres and acres of raw land. Every now and then a hunter stumbled on a pile of bones and it would turn out to be a vic from five, even ten years ago.

Early in his career, Infante had worked a case like that, one where murder was obvious but the body couldn’t be found. The family had been rich and connected, with enough resources to drive the department crazy. When told that the things they wanted-searches, long-shot lab work-would have taken much of the department’s budget for the year, they shrugged and said “So?” It was three years before the body showed up, not even ten yards off a state highway on the upper shore, discovered by a shy-bladder type who had walked into the weeds to take a piss. Blunt-force trauma, the medical examiner concluded, so it was a murder, all right. But there was nothing more to be gleaned from the body or the scene, and the husband, who had been the primary suspect since the start, was dead by then. The only lingering question in Infante’s mind was if the fatal blow had been an accident, another Saturday-night fight in a house that had seen no shortage of such battles, or if there had been more intent to it. He’d spent a lot of time with the husband before cancer of the esophagus got him. The husband even came to believe that Infante came around out of friendship or kindness. He put on a good show of grief over his missing wife, and Infante decided that the guy saw himself as the victim. In his mind all he’d done was give her a push, a shove, no harder than any of the other pushes and shoves he’d meted out over the years, only this time she didn’t get back up. So hubby picked her up, dumped her in the woods, and spent the rest of his days believing himself innocent. You’d think the wife’s family would have been content that he died, fast and ugly at that, but it wasn’t enough for them. For some people, it was never enough.

Infante stepped out of the shower. Theoretically, he was only thirty minutes late. But he was almost sick from hunger; and drive-through didn’t do it for him. He went to the Bel-Loc Diner, where the waitresses fussed over him, made sure he got his steak-and-eggs exactly the way he liked them, the yolks just this side of runny. He pressed the tines of his fork into them, letting the juice flow over the steak, and wondered once again: What the fuck did I do to piss off Debbie?

“WE GOT A babbling brook of a lunatic at St. Agnes Hospital, saying she knows about an old murder,” his sergeant, Lenhardt, said to him. “Go.”

“I’m on the McGowan case. In fact, I had to catch someone this morning, before he left for work. That’s why I was late.”

“I gotta send somebody to talk to her. Late boy is the lucky boy.”

“I told you I was-”

“Yeah. I know what you told me. Still no reason to miss roll call, asshole.”

Lenhardt had partnered with Infante last year, when the department had been shorthanded, and he seemed to be more of a hard-ass since he returned to his sergeant’s duties full-time, as if Infante needed to be reminded who was in charge.

“What’s the point? You said she’s mental.”

“Mental or making shit up to deflect attention from the fact that she left the scene of a bad accident.”

“Do we even know what case she’s promising to solve for us?”

“She was muttering something about Bethany last night.”

“Bethany Beach? It’s not even in the state, much less the county.”

“The Bethany sisters, funny guy. An old missing-persons case.”

“And you’re betting she’s a wack job.”

“Yep.”

“You’re making me waste half my day-St. Agnes is about as far from here as you can get and still be in Baltimore County-to go talk to her?”

“Yep.”

Infante turned to go, irritated and angry. Okay, he deserved to have his balls busted a little, but Lenhardt couldn’t know that for sure, so it was unjust.

The sergeant called after him, “Hey, Kev?”

“Yeah?”

“You know that old expression, egg on your face? I always thought of it as metaphorical, but you reminded me this morning that it can still be literal. You been out talking to people all morning, and no one mentioned that yellow smear on your face?”

Infante’s hand flicked up, found the telltale bit of yolk at the corner of his mouth. “Breakfast meeting,” he said. “I was working an informant that might know something about McGowan.”

“You lie like that automatically?” The sergeant’s voice was not unkind. “Or are you just trying to keep in practice until your next marriage?”

CHAPTER 3

The young doctor took a long time picking his pastry, pointing first to a cruller, then switching to a Danish, only to return to the cruller. Standing behind him, Kay Sullivan could feel his anticipatory delight, but also the guiltlessness of the decision. After all, he was no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, lean as a greyhound, and running on the adrenaline of residency. He was years away from worrying about what he put into his mouth-assuming that ever happened. Some people didn’t, especially men, and this one liked his food. The cruller was clearly the highlight of his morning, a reward at the end of a long night. His pleasure was so palpable that Kay felt almost as if she had chosen a pastry for herself, and was therefore less deprived when she settled for her usual black coffee with two packets of Splenda.

She took the coffee to a corner table and settled in with her emergency paperback, this one from her purse. Kay stashed paperbacks in every nook and cranny of her life-purse, office, car, kitchen, bathroom. Five years ago, when the pain of the divorce was fresh and bright, the books had started as a way to distract herself from the fact that she had no life. But over time Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people’s company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being. At home she had to be hyperconscious not to use books to retreat from her own children. She would put her book aside, trying to watch whatever television program Grace and Seth had chosen, all the while casting longing glances at the volume so near to hand. Here at work, where she could have joined any number of colleagues for breaks and lunches, she almost always sat by herself, reading. Coworkers called her the antisocial worker behind her back-or so they thought. For all Kay’s seeming immersion in her books, she missed very little.

This morning, for example, she had picked up the details of the Jane Doe story within minutes of arriving and unlocking her office. The general consensus was that the woman was a faker, spouting nonsense out of desperation, but she did have a minor head injury, which could affect memory in various ways. There would be a psych examination, too, but Kay had transferred out of that department more than a year earlier, so it wasn’t her concern. The woman’s injuries were fresh, consistent with the accident, and she was not claiming homelessness, joblessness, or abuse by a partner-Kay’s specialties. Of course, she also was refusing to say whether she had medical insurance, but that remained an administrative and billing problem for now. If she turned out to be uninsured, which Kay would put at even odds in this economy, it might fall to Kay to sort out the payment solution, try to figure out if they could bill her through a state or federal program.

But for now Jane Doe was someone else’s problem, and Kay was safe in the world of Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre, her book club’s selection this month. Kay didn’t really much care for her book club, a neighborhood affair that she had joined when her marriage was on its last legs, but it provided a polite social cover for her constant reading. “Book club,” she could say, holding up whatever paperback she was reading, “and I’m behind as always.” The book club itself spent far more time on gossip and food than on the book at hand, but that was okay with Kay, too. She seldom had any desire to discuss what she read. Talking about the characters in a book she had enjoyed felt like gossiping about friends.

A gaggle of young doctors, so much younger than they knew, settled a table away. Kay was usually expert at tuning out ambient noise, but the lone female in the group had one of those sharp, clear voices that sliced the air.

“A murder!”

A week passed, and no news arrived of Mr. Rochester: ten days and still he did not come.

“Like that’s news in Baltimore. There’re, what, only five hundred a year?”

Fewer than three hundred in the city, Kay amended silently. And a tenth of that in the county. In Jane Eyre’s world, the young governess was struggling with feelings she knew she should not have for her master. I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder-how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester’s movements a matter in which I had any cause to take a vital interest.

“My parents were terrified when they heard I was going to be working here. If I was going to move to Baltimore, why not Hopkins? Why not University? I lied and told them that St. Agnes was in a very nice suburban neighborhood.”

Much smug laughter at this. St. Agnes was a good hospital with a fat endowment, the city of Baltimore ’s third-largest employer, but its good fortunes had not helped the neighborhood around it. If anything, the area had slipped a peg in recent years, from reliably working class to seedy and marginal. These close-in suburbs, which had boomed in the early years of white flight, were finding out the hard way that urban problems did not respect imaginary lines on a map. Drugs, crime-they had barreled out of the inner city and right over the city-county line. Those with the means kept moving farther out and farther out. And now downtown was booming, as yuppies and empty nesters and equity-rich Washingtonians decided that they wanted water views and decent restaurants, and who cared if the schools were shit? Kay was grateful that she had held on to the house in Hunting Ridge, impractical and ruinous as it had seemed at the time to stay in the city. Its value had more than tripled, allowing her to tap the equity in hard times. And her ex picked up the private-school tuition. He was good at the big-ticket stuff, but he didn’t have a clue about the day-to-day costs of a child, what sneakers and peanut butter and birthday gifts added up to over a year.

“I hear she’s, what, like forty?” The cawing emphasis made it clear that forty was very, very old. “And she’s saying this happened thirty years ago? So, what, she killed someone when she was ten and just didn’t think to mention it until now?”

“I don’t think she’s saying she did it,” a man’s slower, deeper voice interjected. “Just that she knows of an unsolved crime. A famous one. Or so she says.”

“What, like the Lindbergh baby?” It was not clear to Kay if the young woman was trying to be hyperbolic or if she thought that the Lindbergh kidnapping was in fact thirty years ago. Young doctors, bright as they were in their field, could be shockingly ignorant of other things, depending on how narrowly they had pursued their goals.

And then, with the suddenness of a migraine, Kay realized how insecure the young woman was. Her brittle speech functioned as a cover for someone who had no natural aptitude for the cool detachment required by her chosen profession. Oh, she was going to have a hard time, this one. She should pick a specialty such as pathology, where the patients were already dead, not because she was unfeeling but because she was too feeling. A bleeder, emotionally. Kay felt almost physically ill, exhausted and flu-achy. It was as if this strange young woman had crawled into her lap and asked for comfort. Not even Jane Eyre could shield her from this. She grabbed her coffee and left the cafeteria.

In her twenties and early thirties, Kay had believed that these sudden bursts of insight were limited to her own children. Their feelings washed over her and mingled with hers, as if there were no skin between them. She experienced their every joy, frustration, and sadness. But as Grace and Seth grew up, she found that she could sense others’ feelings, too, on occasion. Usually these people were very young, because the very young had not yet learned how to shield their emotions. But, when conditions were right, adults got to her as well. This engulfing empathy was, perversely, a liability for a social worker, and she had learned to stay guarded in professional situations. It was in quiet moments, when someone caught her unawares, that it tripped her up.

She got back to her office in time to intercept Schumeier from psychiatry leaving a note on her door. He looked chagrined to be caught, and she wondered why he had risked coming to see her in person at all when he could have sent an e-mail. Schumeier was living proof that psychotherapy often attracted those most in need of it. He avoided face-to-face contact whenever possible, even voice-to-voice. E-mail had been a godsend for him.

“There’s a woman who was brought in last night-” he began.

“The Jane Doe?”

“Yes.” He wasn’t surprised that Kay had heard about the woman, quite the opposite. He had probably sought Kay out because he knew there would be little explanation required and therefore less conversation involved. “She’s refusing the psych exam. I mean, she spoke briefly to the doctor, but once the conversation became specific, she said she wouldn’t talk to anyone without a lawyer present. Only she doesn’t want to work with a public defender, and she says she doesn’t know any attorneys.”

Kay sighed. “Does she have money?”

“She says she does, but it’s hard to know when she won’t even give her name. She said she wouldn’t do anything without a lawyer present.”

“And you want me to…?”

“Don’t you have an…um, friend? That woman attorney who’s in the newspapers all the time?”

“Gloria Bustamante? I know of her. We’re not really friends, but we’re both on the House of Ruth board.” And I’m not a lesbian, Kay wanted to add, sure that this was the way Schumeier’s mind worked. If Gloria Bustamante, sexually ambiguous attorney, was acquainted with Kay Sullivan, who had not dated anyone since her marriage ended, then it followed that Kay must be a lesbian, too. Kay sometimes thought she should get a little custom-made button: I’M NOT GAY, I JUST LIKE TO READ.

“Yes. That’s it. Perhaps you could call her?”

“Before I do, I think I should check with the Jane Doe first. I don’t want to summon Gloria out here unless she’s going to talk to her. At the rates Gloria charges, the trip alone would be almost six hundred dollars.”

Schumeier smiled. “You’re curious, aren’t you? You want to get a look at the hospital’s mystery woman.”

Kay ducked her head, searching her purse for one of the peppermints she’d grabbed the last time she splurged and took Grace and Seth to a restaurant. She had always disliked Schumeier’s emphatic pronouncements about what others were thinking or feeling. It was another reason she had transferred out of his department. You’re a psychiatrist, not a psychic, she wanted to say. Instead she muttered, “What room is she in?”

THE YOUNG POLICE officer posted outside room 3030 quizzed Kay endlessly, excited to have something to do at last, but finally let her go in. The room was dark, the blinds drawn against the winter-bright sky, and the woman appeared to have fallen asleep in an upright position, her head twisted awkwardly to the side, like a child in a car seat. Her hair was quite short, a dangerous style for anyone without exquisite bone structure. A fashion choice or the result of chemo?

“Hi,” the woman said, her eyes opening suddenly. And Kay, who had counseled burn victims and accident victims, women whose faces had been all but vandalized by men, was more unnerved by this woman’s relatively unmarred gaze than anything she had ever seen. There was an almost searing frailty to the woman in bed, and not just the usual shakiness of an accident victim. The woman was a bruise, her skin about as effective as an eggshell in keeping the pain of the world at bay. The fresh cut on her forehead was nothing compared to the wounded eyes.

“I’m Kay Sullivan, one of the social workers on staff here.”

“Why do I need a social worker?”

“You don’t, but Dr. Schumeier thought I might be able to help you get an attorney.”

“No public defenders. I need someone good, someone who can concentrate on me.”

“It’s true, they do carry heavy caseloads, but they’re still-”

“It’s not that I don’t admire them, their commitment. It’s just-I need someone independent. Someone not reliant on the government in any fashion. Public defenders get paid by the government in the end. In the end-my father always said-they never forget where their bread is buttered. Government workers. He was one. Once. And he disliked them intensely.”

Kay couldn’t be sure of the woman’s age. The young doctor had said forty, but she could have been five years younger or older. Too old to be speaking of her father in such reverent tones, at any rate, as if he were an oracle. Most people outgrew that by eighteen. “Yes…” Kay began, trying to find a footing in the conversation.

“It was an accident. I panicked. I mean, if you knew the things going through my head, how I hadn’t seen that stretch of highway for-How’s the little girl? I saw a little girl. I’ll kill myself if…Well, I don’t even want to say it out loud. I’m poison. Just by existing, I bring pain and death. It’s his curse. I can’t escape it, no matter what I do.”

Kay suddenly recalled the state fair up at Timonium, the freak-show tent, how at age thirteen she had worked up the nerve to go in, only to find just slightly odd people-fat, tattooed, skinny, big-sitting placidly. Schumeier had her pegged, after all: There was a bit of voyeurism in her mission here, a desire to look, nothing more. But this woman was talking to her, drawing her in, babbling as if Kay knew, or should know, everything about her. Kay had worked with many clients like this, people who spoke as if they were celebrities, with their every moment of existence documented in tabloids and television shows.

But at least the woman in the bed seemed to see Kay, which was more than some self-involved clients managed. “Are you from here?”

“Yes, all my life. I grew up in Northwest Baltimore.”

“And you’re what? Forty-five?”

Ah, that hurt. Kay was used to, even liked, the version of herself she glimpsed in mirrors and windows, but now she was forced to consider what a stranger saw-the short, squat body, the shoulder-length gray hair that aged her more than anything else. She was in good shape by every internal measure, but it was hard to convey one’s blood-pressure, bone-density, and cholesterol numbers via wardrobe or casual conversation. “Thirty-nine, actually.”

“I’m going to say a name.”

“Your name?”

“Don’t think that way, not yet. I’m going to say a name-”

“Yes?”

“It’s a name you’ll know. Or maybe not. It depends on how I say it, how I tell it. There’s a girl, and she’s dead, and that won’t surprise anyone. They’ve believed she was dead, all these years. But there’s another girl, and she’s not dead, and that’s the harder part to explain.”

“Are you-”

“The Bethany girls. Easter weekend, 1975.”

“The Bethany…oh. Oh.” And just like that it came back to Kay. Two sisters, who went to…what, a movie? The mall? She saw their likenesses-the older one with smooth ponytails fastened behind the ears, the younger one in pigtails-remembered the panic that had gripped the city, with children herded into assemblies and shown cautionary yet elliptical films. Girls Beware and Boys Beware. It had been years before Kay had understood the euphemistic warnings therein: After accompanying the strange boys to the beach party, Sally was found wandering down the highway, barefoot and confused… Jimmy’s parents told him that it wasn’t his fault that Greg had befriended him and taken him fishing but made it clear to him that such friendships with older men were not natural… She got in the stranger’s car-and was never seen again.

There were rumors, too-sightings of the girls as far away as Georgia, bogus ransom demands, fears of cults and counterculturists. After all, Patty Hearst had been taken just a year before. Kidnapping was big in the seventies. There was a businessman’s wife redeemed for a hundred thousand dollars, which had seemed like a fortune, a rich girl buried in a box with a breathing tube, the Getty heir with the severed ear. But the Bethanys were not wealthy, not in Kay’s memory, and the longer the story went without an official ending, the less memorable it had become. The last time that Kay thought about the Bethany sisters had probably been the last time she went to the movies at Security Square, at least a decade ago. That was it-Security Square Mall, relatively new at the time, something of a ghost town now.

“Are you…?”

“Get me a lawyer, Kay. A good one.”

CHAPTER 4

Infante took the as-the-crow-flies route to the hospital, traveling straight through the city instead of taking the Beltway around it. Damn, downtown Baltimore was getting shiny. Who’d have thought it? He almost regretted not buying a place in town ten years ago, not that he’d still have it anyway. Besides, he had been raised in the suburbs- Massapequa, out on Long Island -and he had a soft spot for the jumbled secondary highways and modest apartment complexes where he lived up in Parkville. IHOPs, Applebee’s, Target, Toys “R” Us, gas stations, craft stores-to him this was what home looked like. Not that he had any intention of going back there, where it was now almost impossible to live on a police officer’s salary. He kept his allegiance to the Yankees and played the part of the brash Noo Yawkah for his colleagues’ amusement. But in his head, he knew that this town, this job, was right for him. He was good at what he did, with one of the better clearance rates in the department. “ Baltimore punk is my second language,” he liked to say. Lenhardt was on him to take the sergeant’s exam, but then-people always thought you should do what they did. Be a firefighter, his dad said, on the island. His first wife had cajoled, C’mon, watch Law amp; Order with me. She wanted her favorite show to be his favorite show, her favorite meal to be his. She even tried to convert him to Rolling Rock over Bud, to Bushmills over Jameson. It was as if she were working backward, trying to create a logical match from one that had been all heat and desire from the jump. In that way she reminded Infante of himself in high school. He decided where he wanted to go to college-Nassau Community College, no major brain bust, that, it was all they could afford-then gave the guidance counselor the info that would make her computer spit out that school. That way his only option became a choice, instead of something that was forced on him.

He breezed through the city, making the hospital in less than forty minutes. But it wasn’t good enough. Gloria Bustamante-the biggest ballbuster of any defense attorney he knew, male or female, straight or gay-was in the hospital corridor.

Fuck me.

“You look absolutely crestfallen,” the alcoholic old lizard said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to use that word in a sentence before, but now I see it-crestfallen. Like a blue jay whose little tuft is drooping in the front.”

She pulled at her own forelock, a stray piece of red-brown hair that showed an inch of gray at the root. Bustamante was her usual wreck of a self-lipstick in and out of the natural line of mouth, suit missing a button. Her shoes, expensive ones once upon a time, were scuffed and banged up on the toes, as if she’d been kicking something very hard over and over again. Probably a detective’s shin.

“She hire you?”

“I think we have an arrangement, yes.”

“It’s yes or no, Gloria. Are you her lawyer?”

“For now. I’m taking her at her word that she can pay my fee.” Her eyes flicked over him. “You’re here for homicide, right? Not traffic investigation?”

“I could give a fuck what she did with her car.”

“If she talks to you about the murder, can we make the traffic thing go away? No one was really at fault, she panicked-”

“Shit, Gloria. Who do you think you are, Monty fuckin’ Hall, trading me the accident for what’s behind the curtain? Any deal requires a prosecutor’s approval. You know that.”

“Well, then maybe I won’t make her available to you this morning. She’s exhausted, she has a head injury. I’m not sure she should speak to anyone until a doctor can determine if the injury has affected her memory.”

“They checked her out last night.”

“She was treated for her injuries. And she’s just passed a psych exam. But I’d like to bring an expert in, someone from neurosurgery. She might not even remember the collision. She might not be aware that she left the scene of the accident.”

“Save the bullshit for a summation, Gloria, and put the goods on the table. I have to determine that this case is in our jurisdiction.”

“Oh, it’s very much in your jurisdiction, Detective.” Gloria made it sound kind of dirty, her style when talking to men. When Infante first got to know her, he thought the innuendos were a way of her fronting, trying to hide her sexual orientation. But Lenhardt insisted it was a highly developed sense of irony, the kind of mindfuck that a professional mindfucker like Gloria used just to stay in practice.

“So can I talk to her?”

“About the old case, not about the accident.”

“Shit, Gloria, I’m a murder police. I could give a crap about some fender bender on the Beltway. Unless-Wait, did she do it on purpose? Was she trying to kill the people in the other car? Man, maybe this is my lucky day and I can get two clearances, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Gloria flicked her eyes over him, bored. “Leave the humor to your sergeant, Kevin. He’s the funny one. You’re the pretty boy.”

THE WOMAN IN the hospital bed had her eyes closed tight, a kid playing possum. The light in the room showed up the fine hairs on her arm and the side of her face, blond peach fuzz, nothing intense. And there was a hollowed-out look beneath the eyes, a long-lived exhaustion. The eyes flickered open for only a moment, then closed again.

“I’m so tired,” she murmured. “Do we have to do this now, Gloria?”

“He won’t stay long, sweetie.” Sweetie? “He just needs the first part.”

The first part? Then what was the second?

“But that’s the hardest part to talk about. Can’t you just tell him and let me be?”

He needed to assert himself, stop waiting for the introduction that Gloria didn’t seem intent on making.

“I’m Kevin Infante, a detective with Baltimore County homicide.”

“Infante? As in Italian for baby?” Eyes still closed. He needed her to open them, he realized. Until this moment Infante had never considered how vital open eyes were to what he did. Sure, he had thought about eye contact, studied the way that various people used it, knew what it meant when someone couldn’t meet his gaze. But he’d never had a subject sit there-lie there in this case-with eyes closed tight.

“Sure,” he said, as if he’d never heard that before, as if two ex-wives hadn’t thrown that back at him time and again.

Her eyes opened then. They were a particularly vivid blue, kind of wasted on a blonde. A blue-eyed brunette, that was his ideal, the light and the dark, an Irish girl with eyes put in with a dirty finger.

“You don’t look like a baby,” she said. Her voice, unlike Gloria’s, carried no whiff of flirtation. She wasn’t playing it that way. “It’s funny, for a moment I had this vision of the cartoon character, the giant one who wore the diaper and the little cap.”

“Baby Huey,” he said.

“Yes. Was he a duck? Or a chicken? Or was he a baby-baby?”

“A chicken, I think.” Maybe they should get the neurosurgeon in to see her. “You told someone you knew about an old murder here in Baltimore County. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“It began in Baltimore County. It ended-actually, I’m not sure where it ended. I’m not sure it ever ended.”

“You’re saying someone started killing somebody in Baltimore County and finished it elsewhere?”

“I’m not sure-in the end…well, not the end but the part where bad things happened. By then I didn’t know where we were.”

“Why don’t you just tell me your story and let me figure it out?”

She turned to Gloria. “Do people-I mean, are we known? Still?”

“If they were here, they remember,” the old lizard said in a much-gentler-than-usual voice. Was she hot for her? Was that why she was willing to risk taking a case that might not pay? It was hard enough to figure out other men’s taste in women sometimes, much less a woman’s, and Gloria wasn’t sentimental that way in Infante’s experience with her. “Maybe not the name, but the moment they hear the circumstances. But Detective Infante’s not from here.”

“Then what’s the point of speaking to him?” She closed her eyes and settled back on the pillow. Gloria actually gave an embarrassed what-can-I-do shrug. Infante had never seen her so gentle with a client, so solicitous. Gloria took good care of the people she represented, but she insisted on being the boss. Now she was all deferential, motioning him to follow her out into the hall. He shook his head and stood his ground.

“You tell me,” he said to Gloria.

“In March 1975 two sisters left their family’s house to go to Security Square Mall. Sunny and Heather Bethany. They were never seen again. And they weren’t not seen again in the sense that police had a hunch what happened but couldn’t prove anything. Not like the Powers case.”

Powers was shorthand for a decade-old homicide, one in which a young woman had vanished, but no one doubted that her estranged husband was at the heart of that disappearance. They just couldn’t prove it. The conventional wisdom was that the guy had hired someone and lucked out, finding the tightest-lipped, most loyal hit man ever, a guy who never had a reason to trade the information. A guy who never got locked up or bragged drunkenly to a girlfriend, Yeah, I did that.

“So she knows what happened?”

“I can hear you,” the woman in the bed said. “I’m right here.”

“Look, you’re free to participate in the conversation if you like,” Infante said. Was it possible to roll one’s eyes when they were closed? Her expression shifted subtly, as if she were a peeved teenager who just wanted Mom and Dad to leave her alone, but she didn’t say anything else.

“There were some seeming leads in the early days. An attempt to collect ransom. Some, I think, what we would call persons-of-interest today. But nothing panned out. Virtually no evidence-”

“Sunny was short for Sunshine,” said the woman in the bed. “She hated it.” She started to cry but didn’t seem to notice she was crying, just lay in the bed letting the tears flow down her face. Infante was still trying to work out the math. Thirty years ago, two sisters. How young? Gloria hadn’t said. Young, obviously, young enough so that running away was ruled out and homicide assumed. Two. Who grabs two? That struck him as wildly ambitious and prone to failure. Wouldn’t taking two sisters suggest something personal, a grudge against the family?

“Arthur Goode kidnapped more than one boy,” Gloria said, as if reading his thoughts. “But that was before your time, too. He kidnapped a newspaper-delivery boy here in Baltimore and made him watch while…At any rate, he released the delivery boy unharmed. Goode was later executed in Florida, for similar crimes there.”

“I remember that,” said the woman in the bed. “Because it was like us, but not like us. Because we were sisters. And because-”

Here she broke down. She brought her knees to her chest, hugged them with her good arm, the one not bandaged and wrapped, and cried the way someone might heave after food poisoning. The tears and sobs kept coming, unstoppable. Infante began to worry that she might dehydrate herself.

“This is Heather Bethany,” Gloria said. “Or was, many years ago. Apparently it’s been a long time since she’s used her real name.”

“Where has she has been? What happened to her sister?”

“Killed,” moaned the keening woman. “Murdered. Her neck snapped right in front of me.”

“And who did this? Where did it happen?” Infante had been standing all this time, but now he pulled up a chair, realizing he would be there for hours, that he would need to set up the tape recorder, take an official statement. He wondered if the case was really the sensation that Gloria said it was. But even if she was exaggerating its fame, it was the kind of story that would mutate into a clusterfuck when the news got out. They would have to proceed slowly, be delicate in their handling of it. “Where have you been, and why has it taken so long for you to come forward?”

Bracing herself on her right arm, Heather returned herself to a sitting position, then wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, a child’s gesture.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. I just can’t. I wish I had never said anything in the first place.”

Infante shot Gloria a what-the-fuck look. Again she shrugged helplessly.

“She doesn’t want to be Heather Bethany,” Gloria said. “She wants to go back to the life she’s made for herself and put this behind her. Her sister’s dead. She says her parents are dead, too, and that jibes with my memory. There is no Heather Bethany, for better or worse.”

“Whatever she calls herself, wherever she’s been, she is by her own account the witness to the murder of a-How old was your sister?”

“Fifteen. And I was just about to turn twelve.”

“The murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. She doesn’t get to drop a bomb like that and waltz out of here.”

“There’s no one to arrest,” the woman in the bed said. “He’s long gone. Everyone’s long gone. There’s no point to any of this. I hit my head, I said something that I never meant to say. Let’s just forget about it, okay?”

Infante motioned Gloria to follow him into the hall.

“Who is that?”

“Heather Bethany.”

“No, I mean, what name is she going by now? Where does she live? What has she been up to? The cop who brought her in said the car was registered to Penelope Jackson. Is that her?”

“Even if I do have that information-and I’m not saying I do-I’m not authorized to give it to you.”

“Fuck authorized. The law is really clear on this, Gloria, all the way up to the Supreme fucking Court. She was driving a car, she was in an accident. She has to provide ID. If she doesn’t want to do that, she can go straight from here to jail.”

For a moment Gloria dropped all her arch mannerisms-the cocked eyebrow, the half smirk. Strangely, it made her even less attractive. “I know, I know. But bear with me. This woman has been through hell, and she wants to hand you the clearance of a lifetime, if you can be a little patient. Why not indulge her for a day or two? The way I see it, she’s genuinely terrified of revealing her current identity. She needs to trust you before she can tell you everything.”

“Why? What’s the big deal? Unless she’s wanted for some other crime?”

“She swears up and down that she’s not, that her only concern-and this is a direct quote-is becoming ‘wacko of the week’ on cable news. Once she’s revealed as Heather Bethany, her life as she knows it is over. She wants to find a way to give you the case without giving up herself.”

“I don’t know, Gloria. This isn’t my call. Something like this has to go up the chain of command, and they still might send me back to lock her up.”

“Lock her up and she won’t give you the Bethany case. She’ll say it was a delusion born of the accident. Look, you should be delirious with her terms. She doesn’t want any publicity, and your department hates being in the media. I’m the loser here, the one who won’t get any bump, and may not even get paid.”

At this, she reverted to form, batting her eyelashes and puffing out her lips in a monstrous pout. Shit, if anyone resembled Baby Huey, it was Gloria, with that fish mouth and beak of a nose. Beak-that was it, he had the image in his mind now. Not a beak, but a bill. Baby Huey was definitely a duck, and lord fuck a duck, as the old saying went.

CHAPTER 5

A radio was playing somewhere. Or perhaps it was a television in a nearby room. Her room was dead silent, and the light was finally fading, which she found restful. She thought about work. Had she been missed yet? She had called in sick yesterday, but today she hadn’t known what to do. It was a long-distance call, but she didn’t have a calling card handy and she wasn’t sure what would happen if she went through the hospital switchboard and she couldn’t get to the pay phone in the hall without going past the patrolman outside her door. Did calling cards mask one’s movements anyway? She couldn’t take the chance. She had to protect the only thing she had, this sixteen-year existence built on someone’s death, just as everything in her life had been made possible by someone’s death. It was her real life, for better or worse, the longest life she had inhabited to date. For sixteen years she’d managed to have this thing that others would call a normal life, and she wasn’t about to give it up.

It wasn’t much of a life, to be sure. She had no real friends, only friendly colleagues and clerks who knew her well enough to smile. She didn’t even have a pet. But she had an apartment, small and spare and neat. She had a car, her precious Camry, a purchase she had rationalized because of the commute to work, an hour on a good day. Lately she’d been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy-not a woman, obviously, but the same kind of storyteller, unafraid of big emotions and big stories. Shit , she had three tapes due back at the library Saturday. For sixteen years she had never been late for anything-a payment, a library book, an appointment. She hadn’t dared to be. What happened if you turned in tapes late? Did the fines accrue? Did they report you somewhere?

It was ironic, given her work on Y2K compliance, but she had long lived in fear of centralization, a day when the machines would learn to speak to one another, compare notes. Even as she was paid to prevent it, she had been secretly rooting for a systemic breakdown that would wipe all the tapes clean, destroy every bit of institutional memory. The pieces were out there, somewhere, waiting for someone to put them together. This woman-she has the name of a child who died in Florida in 1963. How odd-because this woman, who resembles her, had the name of a child who died in Nebraska in 1962. Yet this woman was a child who died in Kansas in 1964. And this one? She was from Ohio , born in 1962 as well .

At least it would be easy to remember who she was now: Heather Bethany, born April 3, 1963. Resident of Algonquin Lane 1966-78. Ace student at Dickey Hill Elementary. Where had the family lived before? An apartment in Randallstown, but she wouldn’t be expected to remember anything about that time. That was the tricky part. Not knowing what she should know but remembering what she wouldn’t know.

What else? School #201. Dickey Hill. Predictable jokes about the name. A newer building at the time. Jungle gym, chin-up bars in three heights, a slide that became hot to the touch on June days, hopscotch and foursquare grids painted in bright yellow. There had been a merry-go-round, not the kind with horses but one of those rickety metal ones. No, wait, that hadn’t been at the school but somewhere nearby, some-place vaguely forbidden. In the Wakefield apartments that surrounded the school? In her mind she remembered the dirt track first, because she pushed more often than she rode. Head down, like a horse in harness, she had lined up behind the boys, linking her left arm into the metal bar and beginning to run, making the riders scream with delight. She saw the toe of her-she needed a second to remember the shoes. Not athletic shoes, which is why she got in trouble. She was wearing her school shoes, brown, always brown, because brown was practical. But even practical brown couldn’t stand up to the orange dust of that playground, especially after the April rains. She had come home with dirt caked onto the toes, much to her mother’s exasperation.

What else could she tell them? There were eight sixth-grade teachers that year. Heather had the nice one, Mrs. Koger. They took the Iowa Basic Skills Test, and she was in the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. They did science projects that fall. She had netted crawfish from Gwynns Falls and put together an elaborate aquarium, but all four had died. Her father theorized that clean water was a shock to their systems after the murky, polluted stream and her exploration of that thesis had earned her an A anyway. Thirty years later she was beginning to have a clue how the crawfish had felt. You knew what you knew, you wanted what you wanted, even if it was literally scum.

But, of course, this was not what they would demand of her. They didn’t want the story of Heather Bethany before 1975. They wanted to know about the subsequent thirty years, and small details would not satisfy. She could not placate them with anecdotes about, say, her boxy little tape recorder. It was the first purchase she was allowed to make, a reward for six months of living by their rules, for proving her trustworthiness. They were okay with the tape recorder but appalled by the handful of tapes she bought as well. The Who, Jethro Tull, even some of the earlier punk bands. She would lie on the bumpy chenille bedspread, still in her school uniform, and listen to the New York Dolls and, later, the Clash. “Turn it down,” she was ordered. “Get your shoes off the bedspread.” She would obey, but everyone was still appalled. Perhaps they knew that she, like Holly in the Lou Reed song, was plotting to get on the bus and go take a walk on the wild side.

The irony was that they put her on the bus, sent her away as if she were the criminal. They meant to be kind. Well, he did. Her? She was glad to see her leave. Irene had always resented her presence in the household-not because of the pretense required in the external world but because of the reality of what happened within the house. She was the one who carped about the shoes on the bedspread and insisted that the music be turned down to a whisper. She was the one who offered neither solace nor salve for the bruises, wouldn’t even help concoct a reasonable cover story for those badges of occasional resistance-the cut lip, the black eye, the hobbled walk. You got yourself into this , Irene’s placid manner seemed to suggest. You brought this on yourself and destroyed my family in the bargain . In her head she shouted back, I’m a little girl! I’m just a little girl ! But she knew better than to raise her voice to Irene.

The music drowned it all out. Even when it was turned down to whispery volumes, the music made everything go away-the assaults, physical and spiritual, the exhaustion brought on by the double life that was really a triple life, the sadness in his face every morning. Make it stop, she pleaded with him silently from across the round breakfast table, so homey and warm, so everything she had thought she wanted. Please make it stop. His eyes replied, I can’t. But they both knew that was a lie. He had started it, and he was the only person who could find an end to it. Eventually, he proved that he had the power all along to save her, but it was too late. By the time he let her go, she was more broken than Humpty Dumpty, more shattered than the heads of Irene’s precious china dolls, which she had smashed with a poker one brilliant fall afternoon. Composure finally lost, Irene had flown at her, screaming, and even he had pretended not to understand why she would do such a thing.

“They wouldn’t stop looking at me,” she said.

The real problem, of course, was that no one looked at her, no one saw. Every day she walked out into the world with nothing more than a name and a hair color to disguise her-and no one ever noticed. She came to the breakfast table, aching in parts of herself that she barely knew, and the only thing anyone said was, “Do you want jelly on your toast?” Or, “It’s a cold morning, so I made hot chocolate.” See me, Roger Daltrey sang on her little red tape recorder. See me. Irene called up the stairs, Turn that noise down. She yelled back, It’s opera. I’m listening to an opera. Don’t sass me. You have chores.

Chores. Yes, she had a lot of chores, and they didn’t end at nightfall. Sometimes she made a list, called Who-I-Hate-the-Most, and Irene was never lower than three, and sometimes she made it as high as two.

Number one, however, was hers and hers alone.