“Okay, sure, on any given night. But this was the night before Thanksgiving.”

This time Gabe waited Collins out, using his cigarette as a prop. True, he drew on it until it was almost burning ash between his fingers, but he didn’t start babbling again.

“So?” Collins finally asked.

“I happened to drive home that night, to my folks’ place in Trenton. And every toll lane along I-95 was stacked to hell and back. I would’ve killed for E-ZPass. If I weren’t a law-abiding type”-he allowed himself a nervous laugh here, but Collins didn’t join in-“I would have risked running it in some places. And here’s Youssef, trying to get his dick sucked or whatever he does, then get home in a reasonable amount of time so his wife will buy his work-emergency excuse, and he just sits there in line, as if he had all the time in the world?”

He barely felt the frigid air, except in his exposed fingers. He was that flush with his insight, that proud of the detail he had caught. Collins was nodding and taking it in, his esteem for Gabe growing larger by the second, silent as those seconds were.

Then Collins stubbed out his cigarette in the sand-filled ashtray and said: “You think a lot about what goes on in the mind of a guy who’s about to get his dick sucked by another guy?”

With that he walked away, leaving Gabe feeling very small and very cold. Except for his face, where the blood now rose, flaming the handsome, symmetrical features that his female relatives always swore would grease his way through life.

5

Tess arrived home to the usual havoc of a Crow-prepared meal, which she never minded. He was not only an excellent cook but a considerate one as well, insistent on cleaning up after himself. So it was easy to tolerate the by-products of his feasts-the bursts of flour, the dribbles of olive oil, the littered countertops.

Crow’s guest, however, was a tougher sell. The sullen teen was sitting at their dining room table locked in a staring contest with the dogs, both of whom seemed highly skeptical. Esskay’s instincts weren’t worth much; the greyhound disapproved of anyone who didn’t fawn over her. Miata, shy and reserved, was a better barometer. Her narrowed gaze and the slight rumble in the back of her throat did not speak well for the young man facing her.

“Hello,” Tess said.

He looked harmless enough-a skinny, almost scrawny kid with close-cropped hair and skin the color of a full-bodied lager. His most striking features were his amber eyes, one with a black dot in the iris, and slightly pointed ears, which gave his face an elfin cast.

“Hmmmmmph,” he said, not lifting his gaze from the dogs’ glare.

“Lloyd, this is my girlfriend, Tess,” Crow called from the kitchen. “Tess, Lloyd Jupiter. He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

“A while?” Tess echoed. “No, I’m not,” Lloyd said.

“Well, you’re definitely staying here for the night.”

Tess poured a glass of red wine for herself and Pellegrino for Lloyd, who sniffed suspiciously at the bubbles before he sipped it.

“This 7-Up got no taste,” he said.

“It’s water. I’m afraid we don’t keep soda in the house. Where do you go to school?” She was determined to be a good hostess.

“I don’t.”

“Where did you go before you dropped out?”

“Didn’t say I dropped out.”

“Sorry-I just assumed. So did you? Go to school and then drop out? Graduate early? Or are you just truant?”

“I was over at Clifton Park. It didn’t have much for me.”

“What do you do now?”

“I get by.”

“Puncturing people’s tires and then offering to help change them. I heard.” Crow had briefed her on that part while she was driving home, perhaps banking on Tess’s inability to work up a truly righteous rage at him while distracted by rush-hour traffic.

“I didn’t. Another kid did it. Look, you got television? Xbox?”

“There’s a television in the den, which doubles as my office and our guest room. No Xbox or PlayStation, I’m afraid. The only computer game we have is the chess software that came loaded on my laptop.”

“Can I see it?”

Tess took him to her office and set up the wireless laptop. Lloyd didn’t actually know how to play, she noticed. He asked for the computer’s recommendations and sometimes tried to move pieces in ways that were promptly disallowed. But it was a game on a screen, which seemed to satisfy him.

“Hey,” he said after a moment. “This computer’s talking to me.”

“Well, it gives you suggestions-”

“No, it’s talking to me, in this, like, little box. Asking me about”-he squinted at the screen, sounding out the words-“the giant scam.”

“What?” Tess leaned over his shoulder and saw the instant-message box that had opened in the corner. She must have logged on to her IM account by force of habit. The Snoop Sisters-the unfortunate Yahoo group name used to identify the women PIs with whom Tess worked-were enjoying a live chat, and Gretchen from Chicago had assumed it was Tess who was online. Gretchen’s question was pretty much the way Lloyd had conveyed it, albeit even ruder: So how was the giant scam you perpetrated on Christy Media Inc.? Any chance of the rest of us getting cut in on this action?

Not really here, Tess typed back, reaching around Lloyd, who seem to draw himself in as if terrified of contact. Guest using computer. Will provide details via tomorrow’s digest.

“What is that?” Lloyd’s voice was animated for the first time.

“Just IM.”

He looked mystified, but he didn’t ask for clarification. Lloyd seemed resigned to not understanding things.

“IM, instant messaging. If you have friends logged on to a computer at the same time, they can communicate by typing.”

“How?”

He had her there. Tess didn’t have a clue how the technology worked.

“It’s like a phone, sort of, only it’s attached to a computer keyboard. Didn’t they have computers at your school?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t always work and we just used them to, like, write stuff. I been on the Internet at the public library a couple of times, but that was before you needed a library card to use it.” The topic seemed to embarrass him, and his eyes slid away from hers, toward the piles of paper that had migrated back to her office when she finished prepping late yesterday. “Is that your boyfriend?”

He was pointing to the photo of Gregory Youssef, which topped her file on the case, and it took enormous effort on Tess’s part not to laugh. Other than dark hair, Crow and Youssef shared absolutely no resemblance. White men must all look alike to Lloyd.

“That’s the federal prosecutor who was killed.”

Another blank look with no follow-up.

“Right before Thanksgiving. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah, when they jacked everybody up.”

It was Tess’s turn to look confused.

“They, like, picked up every player in the neighborhood, took ’em downtown on all kinda bullshit. Then, like that”-he snapped his fingers-“they let ’em all go. Most of ’em, at least. Some they put charges on, just for the hell of it, or ’cause they was paper on ’em. But they knew all along it wasn’t any of them that messed with him.”

Of course, Tess thought. In the first forty-eight hours, when it was assumed Youssef’s death was job-related, they had probably looked closely at his drug cases, then released the men they had detained without so much as an apology.

“They decided his death didn’t have anything to do with being a prosecutor after all,” she said. “The investigation indicated it was personal.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Not exactly.”

“So they ever find who done it? They usually pretty good at finding out who kills white people.”

There was no edge of resentment in Lloyd’s voice, no political undertone. He was speaking a simple fact. A private-school teacher had been shot and killed in the parking lot of a suburban mall just this month, and suspects had been in custody within forty-eight hours. Meanwhile the board listing Baltimore City ’s homicide victims-mostly young black men-was flush with red, the color used to indicate open cases.