At the high trill of the fax line, she turned and watched two pages peel off the machine, falling to the floor where they rolled and shimmered like shiny snakes. When she didn't move Rick leaned over and picked them up, handing them to her facedown so she could have the first look.

"Well?" he asked as she scanned the old report.

"The Boyds lived on Shook Avenue."

"So your hunch was wrong."

"My hunch was dead-on," she said, looking up with a victorious grin. "The Boyds lived on Shook, but the kidnappers grabbed Danny on Contour Drive, less than a block from Gus Sterne's house on Hermosa. A little blond boy, out with his nanny, the same age and description as Clay Sterne, just outside the Sterne house. Sure, the Boyds never got a ransom demand. Because Gus Sterne did. And never told anyone."

Rick rubbed his eyes. "I'm totally lost," he confessed. "Why did Darden and Weeks have it in for this one family?"

"They didn't. They took Clay because Gus Sterne said he would pay them to kill Lollie and then reneged on the deal. They were just trying to get him to pay up. And if they had taken the right kid, things might have worked out differently all around."

Chapter 25

They left a message for Al Guzman to meet them at the Liberty Bar, where Rick and Kris were to have dinner.

"If she shows," he said glumly, parking next to a lopsided old house that made the Tower of Pisa look stable. But once inside, Tess felt like Brigham Young regarding Utah. The long old-fashioned bar, the worn wooden floors, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the decadent chocolate cake beckoning to her from a sideboard-it was at once homey yet untamed, a place to seek comfort or adventure, depending on one's mood.

"Do you come here a lot?"

"All the time." He looked wistful. "Kris and I have had some of our best fights here."

They took a seat in one of the neon outlined windows overlooking the street. Older ghosts and goblins roamed the sidewalks here, and many of them had spilled into the bar. A devil brandished his pitchfork at a curvy vampire, while a doleful-looking man with an accordion was walking around in huge rubber chicken feet.

"Strange costume," Tess said.

"Old story," Rick said. "Suffice to say, a woman who dances with the man with chicken feet will live to regret it."

The waiter, dressed as a safari-bound Groucho Marx, greeted Rick with a familiar smile and a curious look for the woman who was not Kristina. He left them with fresh bread as they studied the specials on the menu. Pork chops, meat loaf, pasta, eggplant puree on parmesan toast, and-she couldn't help laughing at this-a "Maryland-style" crabcake that was billed as one of the house specialties. No crab for her, Maryland-style or otherwise. But everything else looked wonderful. Everything. Tess, whose Irish roots often had to fight to be heard over the domineering Weinstein genes, had found her inner Molly Bloom. Yes, her taste buds sang out. Yes, yes, yes.

She was not so far gone in her own appetites that she didn't notice how glum Rick still looked.

"Not to pry-" she began.

"You?" But she had gotten a smile out of him. "You're a professional pryer."

"It's just that you and Kristina bicker all the time, and you both seem to enjoy it immensely. So how did you end up having a fight-fight?" She was feeling very warm and wise. Now that she had all but solved the triple murders, she was ready to tackle anything. She could see herself on the radio, dispensing brisk, no-nonsense advice about love and marriage, or telling people how to manage their stock portfolios, repair their cars, build small nuclear weapons with household items.

"Honestly, I don't have a clue. It started out about there being no two percent in my fridge, and the next thing I know, she's slamming doors and saying I'm not serious about our relationship."

"You're the one who wants to marry her."

"She says the marriage talk is a joke to me, that I'd never mention it if I thought there was a risk of her saying yes. At least, I think that's what she said. I kind of zoned out in the middle part, somewhere between the two percent and ‘you son-of-a-bitch.' I was reading the sports pages when she started in on me. That columnist Robert Buchanan, man, he pisses me off. I mean, I'm not saying he should be a homer for the Spurs, but he could cut them a little slack now and then, you know?"

"When Crow and I were together, I was the one who buried my nose in the paper while he prattled." She remembered Charlottesville, the discovery of all the things she hadn't heard-assuming they had ever been said. "Just more proof that I'm not very feminine."

"Wouldn't say that. Wouldn't say that at all."

The compliment was automatic, mindless. Rick was still in his funk, while Tess's mind was racing, making connections someone should have made long ago. The fire at the Sterne house, the fire that was never started at Espejo Verde, despite the gas cans found there. Did Emmie's act prove that she knew the man who raised her was responsible for her mother's death, or was it just a coincidence? And all those psychiatrists, how scared Gus Sterne must have been when one had tried to recover Emmie's memories from the night of the triple murder. You could see how everything fit together if you took a step back. Guzman had been too close, for too long.

The paunchy homicide cop came into the restaurant as she was thinking about him. There was a split second before he spotted them, and Tess used this opportunity to study him. His eyes were so active, like a camera on a motor drive clicking away. She saw skepticism on his face, a hint of amusement at his surroundings. But the primary impression was of someone who made a constant inventory of wherever he happened to be, whether it was a restaurant or a murder scene.

Then he saw them, and his face was instantly more guarded.

"This the kind of place you hang out in?" he asked Rick, sitting down and helping himself to a piece of bread, reaching for the butter, then pushing it away. "Kind of girly, isn't it?"

"The food is good and they've got Shiner Bock on draft. Besides, Tommy Lee Jones always brings the out-of-town press here for all those profiles they're forever doing on him. If it's good enough for Tommy Lee Jones-"

"Then it's good enough for Tommy Lee Jones," Guzman finished. "Now what have you and this particular out-of-towner cooked up for me tonight? You going to tell me where to find your client?"

"I'm going to tell you why you don't need to find him." Tess had intended to be cool, to make Guzman work harder for what she knew, but she couldn't hold back. "Crow didn't kill anyone. Neither did Emmie."

"Yeah?" He was intent on his bread, which he had decided to butter after all.

"Seriously, you've got to listen to me. I know one of the first things police do in any homicide is look to see if anyone benefits from the murder, financially or otherwise-"

"Oh, you mean like that whole motive thing? You know, I knew there was something I forgot." He slapped his forehead with the palm of his free hand. "Twenty-one years on a case, off and on, and I forgot to check if there was a motive."

"No need to be sarcastic, guy," Rick put in. "She's assuming you did your job. So tell us, were there life insurance policies on the victims?"

"Okay, yeah, we checked that. Lollie Sterne's daughter was her beneficiary, while Frank Conyers left Marianna about five hundred thousand dollars. She's probably got more change rattling around in her sofa than that. The cook, Pilar Rodriguez, was the kind of old woman who kept her money in her mattress, so she didn't need an executor for her estate."

"There was a corporate policy, too, one that Lollie took out as a publicity stunt. It paid one million dollars if her hands were damaged. I'm assuming death counts as damage. That policy paid off, and Sterne Foods, which was about to be forced into seeking outside investors, was suddenly in very good financial shape."