“I did. Paged him immediately.”

“And?”

“And he said that’s exactly what it was. Just one big co-inky dink.”

“Did he say co-inky dink?”

“He might as well have. He considers me part of the problem, you know? Me and the board. Thanked me very kindly for the tip, as he termed it, and said they would consider it, but they’re still working under the presumption that the man who killed Tiffani and Lucy is dead.”

“Unless he didn’t die. Unless Carl’s right.”

“Or if there’s another someone and has been all along.”

“Who? No one knows who was on that original list, except for your own board members.”

“I don’t know. Someone who knows what the other guy did?”

Tess was no enemy of coincidence. It permeated life, it powered the daily newspaper, and, as even Mary Ann Melcher knew, made for the best television movies. Most of the stories worth telling, even the smallest anecdotes, begin with a coincidence. You don’t tell people about the 364 days you got on the number 11 bus and didn’t run into your best friend from grade school. You tell them about the one day you did.

But Julie Carter’s demise was a chronicle of a death foretold. Whoever made up that list knew she would join the others as a homicide. Even the cause had been right, a gunshot to the head. That made her death just violent enough to warrant mention in the morning paper, arriving like a sinister greeting card sent by a secret admirer. Here’s another body. Thinking of you.

“Whitney. Did we ever learn the name of the volunteer who put the list together?”

“We know it now. After I talked to Major Shields, I called that jerk attorney for Luisa O’Neal’s foundation. Would you believe he tried to claim privilege? I told him I couldn’t decide if I was going to come to his home with my shotgun or go to the state’s attorney’s office and file a complaint against him.”

“What kind of complaint? It’s not illegal to be a sleazy dumb-ass in Maryland.”

“I was bluffing. That’s why I put in the part about the shotgun. He decided the person in question wasn’t exactly a client, at least not in this capacity, and he was within his rights to tell me.”

“Who gave the board the list, Whitney?”

But even as Tess asked, she knew. Somehow she had always known whose elegant fingerprints she would find on this case.

“Your all-time fave Baltimore philanthropist, Luisa Julia O’Neal herself.” Whitney dug her fingers into her forehead, as if she felt a headache coming on or wanted to claw a memory from her overactive mind. “It was her idea all along, Tess. Looking into these cases, hiring you to do it. She was behind the whole thing, and I never knew. I’m as big a dupe as you in this, maybe bigger. Because I never understood why you thought she was so horrible.”

“But not this horrible,” Tess said.

Whitney lifted her face from her hands. “What do you mean?”

“I hate Luisa O’Neal, but this isn’t her style. She’s been used as surely as we have. Besides, she’s in a nursing home, right? Maybe she didn’t do it. Maybe she’s someone’s fall guy. Where did you say she was?”

“Keswick, I think.”

“Let’s hope they have Saturday morning visiting hours.”

The nursing home on the hill, looming above Baltimore’s pricey Roland Park and not-so-pricey Hampden, had acquired a newer, blander name. But old-timers and old families still knew it as the Keswick Home for Incurables.

That seemed right to Tess. She didn’t know the exact nature of Luisa’s physical ailments, but she had never doubted the rot in her soul was beyond repair.

Luisa was in the clinic, the last stop before the mortuary. Her decline must have been a rapid one to put her there less than a year after taking her own apartment in the residential wing. Tess and Whitney signed in on the depressingly blank visitors’ log for the health care center. The attendant then wrote down three numbers on a sheet of paper and passed it to them.

“Her room number?” Tess asked.

“No, it’s the daily code.”

“Code?”

“To get out.” He gestured to the control pad by the double doors, which had locked behind them. “Our residents aren’t allowed to leave on their own.”

“Grim,” Whitney said.

The atmosphere only got grimmer as they took the elevator to the second floor. Their youth was an affront here, an obscenity. The women they passed in the halls-all women, nothing but women- looked up from their walkers and wheelchairs with undisguised envy. Tess heard a voice calling, weak and empty, a voice with no expectation of a reply.

“And this is the top of the line,” Whitney whispered. “Can you imagine what the bad ones are like?”

Luisa had a private room, which was little more than a glorified hospital room, although she had been allowed to add a few pieces of her own furniture-a chest, a small table, a flowery chintz chair that Tess remembered from the O’Neals’ sunroom. Luisa had sat in that chair when she explained to Tess just what she had done to keep her only son from facing criminal charges for the murder he had committed.

But she didn’t sit in her chair anymore. A large white-uniformed nurse overflowed in it, eyes fixed on the television in the corner. Redhaired and freckled, with olive skin, the nurse would have stumped any census taker who tried to guess her race. Luisa was in a hospital bed, propped up. A hand-lettered sign above the bed reminded the night staff that she was to wear cloth diapers, not plastic, because she was allergic to the plastic ones.

Tess had never thought anything could make her feel sorry for Luisa O’Neal, but that sign came close.

“Money not only can’t buy you love,” she said to Whitney, out of the side of her mouth, “it apparently can’t even guarantee you a dignified old age.”

Luisa’s pale blue eyes narrowed. She picked up a large sketch pad and a black marking pen.

I cannot speak, she wrote, but my hearing is fine.

“She’s such a liar,” said the nurse, one of those stoic, placid souls well suited to the profession. “She can talk, but she won’t, because she sounds funny, and she won’t do her therapy.”

Luisa turned to a fresh page. I do not like to do things if I cannot do them well.

“Big surprise,” Tess said. “But you could at least fill up a sheet of paper before starting on a new one. It’s wasteful, what you’re doing with that sketchbook.”

She shook her head, but it might have been a spasm. Then she wrote, Donna, would you leave us alone, please? The request clearly bothered the nurse, but she didn’t talk back. She heaved herself out of the chair, switched off the television, and marched out of the room. The nurse had a wonderful, insolent walk, her large backside swaying slowly back and forth.

“Do you know why we’re here, Luisa?” Whitney asked. They had decided Luisa might be more responsive to one of her own, another moneyed blueblood.

She hesitated. Tess knew she would lie to them if she thought she could get away with it. At last she wrote, I have my suppositions.

“You forwarded a list, through your foundation’s attorney, to a consortium of nonprofits interested in the issue of domestic violence.”

Luisa nodded.

“You decided which other nonprofits should be invited-and you made sure I was included. Your idea, your list, your project. My family’s board doesn’t have much experience with social issues. But you knew I’d jump at it, didn’t you? And you knew that Tess and I were old friends and I’d put her forward as the private investigator.”

Luisa had no response to any of this, no denial and no affirmation.

“In fact, it was your lawyer who suggested we hire a private detective. And it was your lawyer who said, ”Don’t you know someone like that, Whitney?“ ”

She wrote slowly, with more care than she needed. I cannot speak to things that happened when I was not there.