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He wasn’t dumb, not by a long shot. “She didn’t come on to me. Trust me, I know all the ways that women hit on guys.”

“Yet her boyfriend thought she was cheating on him.”

“He probably just didn’t buy the long hours she was working. Most civilians don’t have a clue as to what we do. But all that girl did was work. She was driven.”

“So her boyfriend comes by the office, confronts her – maybe over the ring, maybe over his belief that she’s two-timed him. But, if Greer was the eager little beaver everyone says she was, wouldn’t his late-night visit have affirmed that? He found her working late. How does that escalate into him beating her to death?”

Tampa rubbed his jaw, where there was a faint red mark and the beaded scab of a fresh scratch, left by a woman’s fingernail. He had been quick to wade into the fight yesterday, heedless of what many would consider his most valuable asset. He had, in fact, lived up to Tess’s teenage version of him, at least for that moment.

“You know what? I don’t know. It’s beyond me, why people do what they do. Hey – that friend of yours, the scary chick – does she have a boyfriend?”

And in that instant, any remnant of her crush was vanquished. Not out of jealousy over his interest in Whitney, but in his indifference to the story behind the death of someone he had known.

“Call her,” Tess said, sincere in her hope that he would. Because Whitney would swallow Johnny Tampa whole and spit out the bones, assuming there were any bones left in that doughy body.

Speak of the preppy devil – here was Whitney, Selene in tow, almost literally. She was dragging Selene by the elbow, piloting her into the bakery, as insistent as a tugboat guiding an ocean liner.

“You are going to eat something if I have to stand over you with a knife,” she hissed at the girl. “Sugar-free gum is not a food group.”

Johnny brightened, presumably at the sight of Whitney, then frowned when he realized she was here in her professional capacity as bodyguard/nutrition counselor.

“I eat,” Selene protested feebly. “I eat a lot when I’m on set. I just have a very high metabolism. And it was my idea to come here, remember?”

Whitney brought two croissants, almond and chocolate, over to the adjoining table, then went back to the counter to fetch a large glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Tess had assumed that Selene would poke the croissants and break them into ever-smaller flakes, but she dutifully forked up bite after bite, finishing the chocolate one and making it halfway through the almond under Whitney’s approving gaze. Tess found herself hoping that Whitney might actually feed Selene, zooming pieces of croissant into her mouth. “Here comes the Escalade. Here comes the Bentley. Here comes the Prius.” But such drastic measures were not needed, although Selene promptly excused herself to the restroom when she was finished.

“I should probably follow her, but I’m exhausted,” Whitney said. “She tried to sneak out twice last night.”

“She did? You should have called me at home.”

“I let you sleep, knowing you had this meeting with what’s-his-name. St. Pete, Tampa, whatever.”

Johnny, nonplussed in Whitney’s presence, simply nodded, smiling inanely.

“Besides, I don’t think she’s bulimic. And she’s probably telling the truth about her metabolism. Oh, if she let herself go, she might become a size four verging on six, but she doesn’t have to worry about her weight.”

“Actually, she does,” Johnny said. “A size six is way too big for a woman who wants to play romantic leads. Sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Hmmmmph,” Whitney said, reaching into Selene’s bag and extracting her iPhone. “Might as well search her incoming and outgoing calls while she’s in there. Jesus, I can’t believe how many people she has in her address book. Oh, wait – I can check her e-mails, too. God, I love Mac.”

“That’s so… rude,” Johnny said, genuinely offended on Selene’s behalf. “Maybe illegal.”

“I don’t read anything, or listen to voice mail. I just check the senders. You know what I found under her bed this morning, when I was looking for alcohol?”

“Alcohol?” Tess asked, reaching for the iPhone and running her own check. Several calls from Ben – but nothing to him.

“No, not a drop, not even a can of malt liquor. I found two books – Edith Hamilton’s Greek mythology and a copy of Kristin Lavransdatter.

“You might have sparked the interest in Hamilton,” Tess said. “When you told her that her name was from the goddess of the moon, as opposed to a Mormon soap opera.”

“Yeah, but Kristin Lavransdatter? And it was the third volume, to boot, The Cross. Could she possibly have read volumes one and two?”

“Maybe she thought Lavransdatter was Kirsten Dunst’s name before she changed it,” Tess offered.

“Just because she’s an actor doesn’t mean she’s stupid,” Johnny said with surprising heat. “Okay, well – Selene isn’t a raging intellectual. But you shouldn’t mock her for reading. Maybe that’s why the books were under the bed in the first place, because she thought you would make fun of her. For all Selene knows, this Lard-butter, or however you say it, is one of those books everyone has read, and she’s embarrassed not to know it.”

Whitney nodded. “And maybe monkeys will fly out my-”

Tess interrupted, hoping to placate Johnny. “At the very least, it could be for a film. The author was a Nobel Prize winner. Maybe someone’s interested in adapting it.”

“It’s already been adapted,” Johnny said. “By Liv Ullmann, back in the 1990s. But, you’re right, that wouldn’t rule out a Hollywood version, although I haven’t heard anything about that on the grapevine.”

Johnny was blushing furiously, his gaze downcast. His crush on Whitney must be really bad, Tess reasoned, if he couldn’t even make eye contact. Selene came trip-trapping back to the table in her ridiculously high heels, and Johnny muttered: “Gotta go.”

“God, he’s so jealous of me he can’t stand it,” Selene said cheerfully. “He’s even jealous that I had a stalker and he didn’t, that I was in most of the photographs and he wasn’t.”

A shred of conversation, a piece of unfinished business, came back to Tess. “The photograph at the memorial – was that one of the stalker’s?”

“I told you that,” Selene said, stroking her hair, oblivious to the fact that she was leaving little flakes of pastry behind. “I said it was the guy.”

“You said – oh, never mind. Was Greer in all the other photos as well? The ones taken by the dead man, Wilbur R. Grace?”

“Don’t be ridic. I mean, Greer was in some, but so was Ben. And Flip and Lottie. But I was in most of them. At least – I was in all the ones I saw. I don’t know, maybe there were others, but who’s going to be silly enough to stalk Greer?”

Chapter 29

The not-the-Meyerhoffs Meyerhoffs lived in Baltimore Highlands, a county neighborhood that people found mostly by accident, taking a wrong turn en route to the Harbor Tunnel. The streets here were named for states, but the pattern was maddeningly indecipherable to Tess – Louisiana led to Tennessee, then Alabama, which was followed, of course, by Pennsylvania, then Michigan and Florida. The Meyerhoffs lived in a brick semidetached on the bottom rung, Delaware Avenue, just north of the thruway to the tunnel, where traffic was a dull, roaring constant.

Before venturing here, Tess had run a quick computer check on Jeanette Meyerhoff. Or, more correctly, paid a premium to have her own ad hoc hacker search the court files and police records. Her suspicion was that a woman who felt comfortable starting a fight at a memorial service might be prone to other crimes of impulse. She was at once gratified and unnerved by how correct her hunch was. Jeanette had a pretty lengthy arrest record – public intoxication, resisting arrest, a string of assault charges. And three of her four sons had amassed similar records, with one currently serving real time down in Jessup, on a drug distro charge.