"I was a mule, okay? I was a mule and I got popped."

"A mule?"

"I carried drugs for a man. I was taking them to Atlantic City on the train, and they picked me up the second I got off. The public defender up there got me off-he asked for a lab test and it turned out the stupid-ass motherfucker had put me on the train with a case of powdered sugar and quinine. But by the time I got home, I'd been gone for a week, and they had taken Donnie. He had to go to school and flap his big mouth about how he didn't have no mama and he was living off cereal. Social Services told me he couldn't come home until I took some class about how to be a parent. I had two more classes to go when he was killed."

"The man you carried the drugs for-was he Donnie's father?"

"No." Keisha's look told Tess that she found the question incredibly stupid. "He was just some guy I was with for a while."

"What was his name?"

"Look, he's dead. What you need to know his name for? He was a stupid, stone-ass junkie and he ended up the way most junkies do. I may have tried to help him sell some drugs, but I never took any."

"The guy you're with now, Laylah's father-he's not part of that life, is he?"

"Don't worry. I'm not planning on being the same fool twice." Keisha stood, her curves shifting again. She was like a big, walking Jell-O mold of a woman. She opened her purse, a bright yellow bag bigger than some suitcases. "You got any more questions, or can I go get me my dining room set now? I owe $119 on it. You can just round it up to $120 if you need to go to the ATM to get it."

"I said I'd get you furniture. I didn't say it would necessarily be the furniture you had paid down on."

Keisha's mouth was a round little O of rage, although no sound came out. If she hadn't been wearing her Sunday best, she might have flown across the desk at Tess. Instead, she snapped her purse shut, stamped her feet, stamped her feet some more. Tess ignored her dramatics, scrawling a set of numbers on a piece of paper.

"There's a man named Spike Orrick," she said, passing the paper to Keisha. "Call him at this number, and say Tesser sent you. It's important that you refer to me as Tesser, that's how he'll know I gave you this number. He'll get you the furniture you need by nightfall and some food, too. He may even throw in a new television set, or a stereo, if he has one handy."

Keisha looked at the piece of paper skeptically. "We talking new furniture, or some secondhand shit?"

"It will be as nice as whatever you picked out, probably nicer," Tess assured her. "And Keisha?"

"Yeah?"

"Why don't you have Spike throw in a changing table? On me."

Chapter 18

The Butcher of Butchers Hill was back. With a vengeance, one might say. Certainly, that was what every single television reporter in Baltimore felt obligated to say, as if they were all working from the same handbook of tasteless clichés.

Tess and Kitty watched the six o'clock news together that night in Kitty's kitchen, clicking from channel to channel in order to see the same five-year-old footage unspool again and again. As Tyner had predicted, the police didn't have enough evidence to charge Luther Beale. As Tess had suspected, that didn't keep the media from going hog-wild with the story. On each of Baltimore's four early evening newscasts, another solemn face beneath another fluffy head of hair recounted the same scant details: Beale questioned in murders of teenage twins who had testified against him. No charges filed. At least one resourceful reporter then resorted to the time-honored punt of journalists everywhere: the man on the street, live and uncensored.

"I think we need more people like Luther Beale," said a balding white man identified as Joe of Remington, a scrappy, lower-middle class neighborhood. "I mean, who did he kill? Three punks. A delinquent, a whore, and a druggie. This city could use a few more Luther Beales."

Words to warm Martin Tull's heart, Tess thought. He wasn't the primary on the case, thank God, but she knew he wouldn't give up on trying to get her to talk to the police. Tull had a zealot's conviction when it came to Luther Beale, and the case seemed to become more personal for him every day.

On camera, Joe kept speaking, his features pinched in an uglier and uglier rage, but with voice-over narration from the anchor substituting for his other thoughts on the case. You didn't have to be a particularly good lip-reader to make out the non-FCC sanctioned words flying from Joe's mouth, along with a few choice racial epithets. Another drawback of doing man-on-the-street interviews. Sometimes, the man said what he really thought.

"Now what's the point of giving air time to someone like that?" Kitty asked, genuinely puzzled.

"Don't you know, that's their version of providing ‘both' sides of the story," Tess said. "On the one hand, killing is wrong. On the other hand, what if you kill the right people? Jesus Christ. Have you noticed no one is entertaining the notion Beale didn't do it? At least Tyner was smart enough to keep Beale away from reporters. If it gets out he doesn't think he killed Donnie Moore, he's going to look like a lunatic."

"How can you work for him if you don't believe him?"

"I believe he didn't kill the Teeter twins. I believe he saw a car and heard something the night Donnie was killed. Did someone else shoot Donnie Moore? I don't know and it's not important. For what it's worth, I believe he believes in his innocence, but Luther Beale is a man who likes to be right. Over the past five years, he may have gone over and over that night in his mind until he's found a way to clear himself. It doesn't matter. They're not going to try him again for the death of Donnie Moore."

"It seems to me everyone is overlooking one possibility in this," Kitty said, switching the television to a cooking show on one of the cable channels. Kitty didn't like to cook any more than Tess did, but she liked to watch. "This could be a coincidence. A hideous, totally random event."

"What do you mean?"

"Destiny had a habit of getting into strange men's cars, right? Treasure just had a habit. They lived high-risk lives. If you have a sister who hang-glides and a brother who sky-dives, would it be so unusual if each died within a few weeks of each other? It would be strange and stunning, worth a story in a newspaper, but it wouldn't be unheard of. You read about leukemia clusters, strange concentrations of cancer cases in certain places, like the one up in Massachusetts, but they can never quite prove the link. I think there are sorrow clusters, too, unexplained critical masses of tragedy."

Tess considered this. Kitty's logic was screwy yet appealing. But she didn't buy it, even if a Baltimore jury might.

"I think the two deaths are connected. Treasure said Destiny had gone somewhere, and when she came back, they were going to be rich. He said she had gone to Burma. Maybe that's some new street term for selling drugs."

"I think Burma's called Myanmar now."

"Do you expect some kind of geographic exactness in the local drug trade? Look, Keisha Moore told me today about being a ‘mule,' an unwitting deliverywoman for some dealer. I wonder if Destiny got caught up in something like that, and someone killed Treasure, thinking his drug-addled brain could hold onto enough details to be dangerous."

"I like my theory," Kitty said stubbornly. "Sorrow clusters."

"So it does," Tess said. "Shit, look at the time. If I'm late for my second night of telemarketing, the boss will have my head. I thought having my own business meant not answering to anyone. But clients expect far more than my bosses ever did."

"It helped," Kitty said, "that you worked for me and Uncle Donald."