14

In principle Tess disliked people who used cell phones in restaurants. But she was getting ready to make an exception for herself, rationalizing that she hadn’t spoken to Crow all day, when Tyner arrived for their meeting. His face was stormy with general disapproval-of her cell phone, of the restaurant, of Tess, who had chosen it-and she meekly slid the phone back into her knapsack.

“You can’t keep playing this silly game of hide-and-seek,” he said as soon as he had barked his drink order at the waitress. Tyner wasn’t big on social preliminaries. “You need to decide what you’re going to do when you finally surface.”

“I could take the Fifth.”

“You haven’t broken any laws.”

“Maybe I think I have,” Tess said.

“Your lawyer,” Tyner said, pointing to his chest in case she had forgotten he was here in a professional capacity, not a family one, “is informing you that you haven’t. You can’t invoke self-incrimination if you haven’t in fact done anything incriminating. That’s a kind of perjury, too.”

“I could marry Lloyd and refuse to testify against my husband.”

“Don’t be droll, Tess. Besides, if you married the boy, you’d create a legal trail that would lead police right to him. That’s the one thing you’ve managed to do right so far, through no real fault of your own. The boy’s name isn’t recorded anywhere. If Crow had given Lloyd’s real name to the police the night of the accident, the detectives would eventually have pieced it together. As it is now, they’re probably searching Baltimore for Bob ‘One O’ Smith.”

“I know,” Tess said. “That’s Crow’s karma. He’s also refused to help the insurance companies, who are just as keen to find our little friend.”

“He won’t be able to stonewall them forever, you know. And you won’t be able to evade the cops much longer. They’ll put you in front of the grand jury when it meets next month. You’ll be asked to name the source you brought to Marcy and Feeney. If you refuse to name a person of interest in a homicide case, you could be jailed. In fact, they’ll take great delight in locking up a middle-class white woman.”

“A lot could happen before the grand jury convenes. Lloyd could decide to come forward on his own-”

Tyner, a champion snorter, gave a short, elegant whiff of air. It was the equivalent of a teenage girl’s “as if.”

“Or they could develop leads in the case that make Lloyd irrelevant.”

That earned a shake of the head and an even more contemptuous snort. Tess didn’t take it personally. Tyner was grouchy with everyone but Kitty, his wife of almost six months. (He insisted on calling her his “bride” with a kind of starry-eyed, gooey devotion that Tess found far more alarming that his usual cantankerousness.) But his mood was particularly dark today, a fact that Tess chalked up to her choice of lunchtime rendezvous, the Club 4100. She had picked the old bar in the Brooklyn section of Baltimore for its twin advantages of cheeseburgers and an off-the-beaten-track location. No one ever ended up in the Club 4100 by accident. She also loved the décor, which had been built around Baltimore sports in general and Johnny Unitas in particular. Alas, the restaurant did have a habit of serving red wine chilled, and she hadn’t warned Tyner off the cabernet in time. The icy grape wasn’t improving his mood.

“Outside a grand jury setting, I can’t be compelled to tell the cops anything, right?”

“No.”

“And it’s not illegal to lie to cops in an interview?”

“It depends, but no, it’s not like with the feds-only why would you even think of trying to lie at this point?”

“I could give them a fake name or say I honestly don’t know the kid’s name, that I met him through someone.”

“They’d want to know who made the introduction, then.”

Tess shrugged. It would be ironic if the cops used the same trick on her that Marcy had played on them, asking her if they would be wrong to assume the source was the kid who had stolen her car. Of course, cops didn’t need to play such games. They could jack her up now, apologize later. After all, that’s what Lloyd said had happened in the wake of Youssef’s death. The drug dealers had been arrested and held on whatever pretense the investigators could manufacture, then let go when a different scenario emerged.

Seemed to emerge. That’s what intrigued Tess. Youssef’s murder had been a mise-en-scène, an elaborate play. Yet the multiple stab wounds still struck Tess as awfully personal. Thirty-nine stab wounds wasn’t an act. The scenario had been faked, but the rage had been real.

She reached for the scar on her knee, remembering the night she had used far more bullets than strictly necessary to defend her own life. She had fired until the gun was empty, and she would have done that if the weapon had held ten, twenty, a hundred bullets. If she could dig the man up and shoot him again, she would.

“I wish I could talk to the widow.”

“I hardly recommend that course of action.” Tyner was cupping his hands around the frigid glass of red wine, but not the way a wine lover might. He was rubbing them back and forth like a Boy Scout making a fire from twigs, trying to bring his drink to room temperature.

“No, no, of course not,” Tess agreed automatically. “Why not?’

“Because to Mrs. Youssef you’re the woman who’s shielding someone who could help police solve her husband’s murder. Besides, what would that accomplish?”

“Lloyd told us everything he knew. He’s done as a source of information. Whatever happened to Youssef, Lloyd was at arm’s length from the origin of the plan, an errand boy, assigned to use the card and create an alternate reality.”

“So he claimed. Did it ever occur to you that Lloyd might have been directly involved in the murder and that he’s spinning the story to deflect suspicion?”

The question caught Tess off guard. She was so sure she had considered every angle of Lloyd’s story, processing it through what she thought of as her cynic meter.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t recognize Youssef’s face. Lloyd’s not sophisticated enough to lie on that many levels. How can you be an accessory to murder if you don’t know what the guy looks like?”

“By helping to cover up the crime,” Tyner said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle, which always troubled Tess more than his usual rages. “Which is what Lloyd did, Tess. Don’t lose sight of that. He helped someone conceal a murder and create a chain of evidence designed to confuse investigators.”

“But until he met me, he didn’t even know that the two things were related.”

“So you say. So you believe. But you can see why homicide detectives might be a little more dubious. It’s not unreasonable to think that Lloyd is now trying to cover his ass, distance himself from a crime.”

“Sure, if they had him on another charge and he offered up this story to save his own neck. But no one had any leverage over Lloyd.”

“You did. You could have turned him in to the police for stealing Crow’s car. Which, with Lloyd’s record, meant more time inside.”

“Only, what he told us checked out. The police have confirmed now that they always knew about the ATM charges but had been sitting on them because they thought it was something that only Youssef’s killer could know.”

Youssef’s killer-Tess heard the echo and made the same argument in her head that she had been making to Tyner. Lloyd didn’t know what Youssef looked like, so he couldn’t be directly connected to his murder. Youssef was dead in a state park when Lloyd bought his sandwich, while Youssef’s car was crossing into Delaware. He couldn’t have been there. Right?

Tyner took a sip of his wine, frowned at the taste and the temperature but pressed on. “Even if you’re not going to cooperate with Howard County police, I think you should go down there-with me of course-and pretend to be a good citizen. Okay? Maybe we can argue that Lloyd was a client who made an oral contract with you to keep his identity secret and that you expose yourself to a civil lawsuit by breaching that promise.”