“Crow, you are out of your fucking mind.”

“Why? It’s just one night.”

“There are a thousand whys, but I can’t have this conversation outside the ladies’ room at the Blight.”

The use of the paper’s nickname earned her a stern look from a beetle-browed woman stalking by, legal pad in hand. It wasn’t very gracious, disparaging the paper on its own premises.

“I’ll tell you what: We’ll meet for dinner somewhere, and I’ll size this kid up before you bring him into-our house.” She had almost said “my,” a bad habit. “I could be at the Brass Elephant in half an hour.”

“Lloyd’s underage. We can’t take him to a bar.”

So it was Lloyd now, underage Lloyd. “What does he want, an expense-account dinner at Charleston?”

“What he really needs is a home-cooked meal, something that will stick to his ribs. I was thinking lamb stew, some chipotle muffins.” He was trying to soften her up, naming two of her favorite dishes. It was working.

“Okay. To dinner. I’m not guaranteeing him a bed for the night. I get to reserve judgment on that until I meet him.”

“Tess, I’m not the naïf you like to make me out to be. I’ve got some street sense.”

“Of course you do,” she said, but her assurances rang hollow even to her.

She pushed her way into the ladies’ room. This, too, had been upgraded, the once institutional green-and-peach color scheme replaced with gleaming stainless steel and stark white tiles. A young woman, the multinational brunette from the presentation, leaned toward her lovely reflection, inspecting her invisible pores, her nonexistent lines. Asian? Black? Latina? Possibly all three.

“Your talk was fascinating,” she said when she caught Tess’s eye in the mirror. “Completely opened up my mind to new ways of reporting.”

Tess wanted to take the compliment, but the gushing was too rote.

“Please don’t suck up. It makes me nervous.”

“That’s refreshing,” the girl said, returning her gaze to her own face. “The men around here can’t get enough smoke blown up their butts. I tell you, it’s exhausting.”

Tess laughed with relief. Here was the smart-aleck attitude she remembered, the coarse vocabulary she expected from journalists.

“I’m rotten with names. You’re…”

“Marcy. Marcy Appleton.” Tess tried not to smile. It was such a hilariously all-American, blond-cheerleader name. The girl’s accent was midwestern, too, with broad o’s and a’s. “I cover federal courts.”

“You really want to do investigative stuff?”

“It’s the most prestigious thing you can do here, now that they’re consolidating the national bureaus throughout the chain. And everyone knows that the foreign bureaus will go next. Which sucks, because I came here banking on a post in Asia. I’m fluent in Mandarin, and I traveled throughout the region between college and grad school. Know who they sent to cover the tsunami? Thomas H. T. Melville III, who’s barely mastered English.”

“He’s…”

“The idiot who started to ask you what it felt like to kill someone.”

Marcy paused, took a pot of gloss from her purse, and rubbed it gently over her lips. Apparently she wanted to know, too, but was too polite to ask outright. Tess opened her own leather satchel and revealed the Beretta that she always kept at hand.

“I didn’t always carry this. Now I do.”

The girl nodded. She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Tess, but she seemed to be from another generation or perhaps even a different species, one characterized by boundless confidence and self-esteem. “And I guess you don’t use it as a figure of speech anymore. It would be impossible to say ‘I want to kill so-and-so’ once you’ve done it literally.”

“Yeah,” Tess said absently. “Yeah.” She was thinking, Actually, I want to kill my boyfriend.

“There was one thing you said-about the Youssef case-that didn’t exactly track for me.”

“Yes?” Tess suddenly didn’t feel as kindly inclined toward the girl.

“The federal courthouse is my beat, although all the boys keep trying to bigfoot me on the story. Only nothing’s coming out. It’s not the most leak-happy place under any circumstances, but the discipline on the Youssef murder is remarkable. I can’t get the feds to speak, even off the record, about what a piss-poor job the Howard County cops are doing, and I can’t get the Howard County cops to say anything about what the feds should or shouldn’t be doing.”

“The old divide-and-conquer technique, huh?”

“Exactly. You were probably a good reporter in your day.”

“Merely adequate. But the closemouthed atmosphere you’re describing-that only supports my theory, right?”

“I suppose so.” Marcy frowned. She really was lovely. With a face like that, she probably wasn’t used to not getting what she wanted from men, and the federal bureaucracy was dominated by men, although the acting U.S. attorney was a woman. “The thing is, Youssef was a flirt. I always thought he was kind of hitting on me. But, you know, it would have been unethical to act on it. He was a source.”

“And married.”

“Oh, yeah,” Marcy said, although this seemed a secondary concern to her. The paper’s ethics policy probably didn’t cover adultery, just sex with sources. “Still, he definitely had an eye for women.”

“Good cover for a closeted man, don’t you think? They can be the worst Lotharios of all. Or maybe he was bi. Or his killer could have been a female prostitute. His wife was eight months pregnant at the time. The particulars remain the same. It was vicious, it was personal-and no one wants to talk about it.”

“Maybe,” Marcy said. “I don’t know. In the end it’s so hard to know what goes on in anyone’s head.”

“Keep that kind of talk within these walls. Out there never admit that you don’t know anything. They don’t.”

Emerging from the sanctuary of the ladies’ room, Tess almost tripped over a lurking man, a whey-faced middle-aged version of the young comers she had been instructing all day. Introduced to him that morning, Tess had already forgotten his name, but she retained his bio: a new assistant managing editor, imported from Dallas just a few months ago, according to Feeney. Rumor was that he had been installed by corporate with orders to gut the newsroom budget. When that was accomplished, he would be rewarded with the top job.

“Initial feedback on your presentation was very positive,” he said. He had that unfortunate bad breath that nothing can mask, so it ends up being bad breath with a minty, medicinal overlay. “The reporters said you had lots of insight into out-of-the-box thinking.”

“I hope no one actually said ‘out of the box.’ Or if they did, they were promptly fired.”

“We’re a union paper, we can’t fire anyone,” the editor said, wringing his hands mournfully. Hector Callahan, that was his name. Hector-the-Nonprotector. Hector-the-Nonprotector-Complete-with-Pocket-Protector-Who-Liked-to-Talk-About-News-Vectors. Tess was training herself to use rhymes as mnemonic devices.

“I was joking.”

“Oh.” He looked puzzled, as if jokes were an archaic social custom. “You know, I think that there could be a place for you here. On staff. Well, not on staff-we couldn’t offer benefits-but on retainer, as a consultant.”

Here was the offer that Tess had dreaded, the one she must sidestep adroitly if she was going to turn this into a traveling gig throughout the chain’s holdings.

“That would create all sorts of conflicts of interest for me. Few clients are going to feel comfortable working with a private investigator who also works for the local newspaper.”

“But if we did it on a case-by-case basis-the Youssef matter, for example. If you, as a private detective, fleshed out your theory-did some actual legwork to verify your…um, suppositions-and brought that report to the newspaper, then we could report your findings.”