The problem was, when it came to seeing a guy like Ethan for what he was, I wasn’t so sure of her abilities. If you’re working on the street as a reporter, you usually spend time around a wider variety of people than editors do. You start to learn what most liars look like when they’re lying to you-not all, by any means, but the garden variety becomes readily apparent, and eventually some of the most expert find it harder to get past you. You figure out who’s uncomfortable with attention just because they’re a little shy, and who is hoping you will not ask a dreaded question. You don’t always find what’s hidden, but you almost always sense when something important is being kept out of view.

I had no doubt that Lydia could tell if something in a story didn’t ring true. But I wondered now if she had lost some of that ability to read people as well as she read stories.

Then I remembered Mark’s comments about how often Ethan showed up hungover, and also that I had failed to notice that the little twerp had watched me enter my password. I decided I should worry about my own inability to keep my BS detector working.

Even if Ethan had managed to log on to my computer before now, I wasn’t too worried about him looking at my notes. I was, you might say, a third-generation cryptographer.

O’Connor had been trained in newspaper work by Jack Corrigan, who had worked for the paper at a time when the morning News was the rival of the evening Express. Reporters spied on one another all the time. Corrigan wrote his notes in an oddball code-a mixture of a kind of shorthand, initials, and ways of referring to things that might not be readily apparent. RCC, for example, was not the Roman Catholic Church, but “the rubber chicken circuit,” or political fund-raising banquets.

O’Connor learned it and added his own layer of code to it, and once he decided I was worth the trouble, taught it to me. Even though there was only one paper by then, the code helped. If you’re in a room full of professionally nosy, often competitive people, sooner or later a slow news day will lead them to be curious about one another. It’s frowned upon. It happens anyway.

So the code remained useful. Maybe one day I’d pass it along to a younger reporter-but Ethan was not going to be a candidate to inherit.

I had just thought this when Ethan came over to his desk, smiling. He logged off his computer and gathered his notebook and jacket. He looked over at me and his smile widened to a grin. “See you in a few days,” he said.

“A few days?”

“I’m flying out this afternoon. Mr. Wrigley wants me to go up to Folsom and interview Bennie Lee Harmon.”

55

“I DIDN’T KNOW THAT ABOUT O’CONNOR’S SISTER,” MAX SAID.

We were sitting together in the living room after dinner, during which we had heard about Max’s fiancée, courtship, and future plans. They hadn’t known each other long, about three months now, but he had apparently fallen for her almost on sight. Her family was wealthy, so she didn’t seem to be after his money. He had shown us a photo of a lovely, almost ethereal-looking blonde. If she had given him the smile she wore in the photo-no mystery in why he had pursued her.

Frank had made it back in plenty of time. Harmon was ill, he said, and not able to talk for long. Frank told Max about Harmon’s two-out-of-three confessions on the old cases.

“O’Connor rarely let anyone know about Maureen,” I said.

“It explains so much, though,” Max said. “I remember how he used to speak about the missing.” He turned to Frank. “Will you be able to use DNA to tell if Harmon killed O’Connor’s sister, too?”

“Possibly,” Frank said. “I have to take a closer look at the evidence we gathered at the time, and how it has been stored. We had a good lab man back then. I’m told our coroner-this was before Woolsey-was a big believer in freezing tissue samples and the like, so if no one has dumped them out of the freezer at some point along the way, we may be in luck. But I’m not getting my hopes up just yet.”

“Can Ben Sheridan help in a case like this?” I asked.

“He might. He’s been called in on the investigation into Municipal Cemetery-they’re digging up a lot of graves over there trying to straighten out who belongs where, so he’s been really busy with that. But we’re going to have him take a look at the photos, see if he thinks it’s worth exhuming the girls’ remains.” He turned to Max. “Have you met Ben?”

“Not yet. He’s your forensic anthropologist friend, right? The one who stayed here with his dog for a while?”

“Yes. A good friend, and good at his work, too. He’s agreed to come by tomorrow and take a look at the photos.”

“Any idea why Harmon is so adamant that he didn’t kill her?”

Frank hesitated. “I can’t back this up with proof yet, but I think he’s so adamant because he didn’t do it. I’m beginning to think he’s telling the truth.”

“What?”

“I’m not the first to see that there are differences in the way the bodies were left, or what had been done to them. Dan Norton, the detective who worked on the case in the 1950s, left a lot of notes on this one, and he had the same feeling I do-he thought it was possible that someone else had killed Maureen.”

“But the timing-in April, every two years,” I said. “And what you’re saying would mean that the person who killed Maureen knew those other girls were buried there and never told anyone.”

“Believe me, I see the problems.”

“I don’t know,” Max said. “The best place to hide a body must be a grave. Think of that story in this morning’s paper.”

Frank laughed. “Don’t mention that story to Irene.”

I told Max about Ethan.

Max shrugged. “He still had to do a lot of work in order to write the story, though, didn’t he?”

“Yes. But it isn’t cool to do what he did to Hailey.”

“I can see that,” he said. He looked at Frank. “Actually, I have an interest in the contents of a grave, too. I hope you might be able to help me.”

“One of these ones in Municipal Cemetery?”

“No, in All Souls. The Ducanes are buried there.”

“What exactly do you have in mind?”

He shifted a little, then said, “Gisella’s family has…expressed concern about my parentage.”

“What? In this day and age?” I said, outraged. “Are they ‘Granny came over on the Mayflower’ types?”

“No, no, I’m sure that’s not it,” he said, not sounding all that sure to me. “What they said to me was, well, if we want to have children…it’s a legitimate concern.”

“A legitimacy concern, maybe?”

“Maybe,” he admitted with a sigh. “They say they are worried that without knowing my parentage, there may be hereditary diseases I could pass on to our children.”

“And?” I asked, sensing that wasn’t all there was to it.

He spoke softly when he answered. “They also say that if our children are indeed the great-grandchildren of the Vanderveers and Linworths, they should know their heritage.”

After a moment, I said, “And take Grandmother Lillian Linworth’s inheritance?”

“I’ve told them there can be no need, given my own situation. I can already provide more than enough financial security for any children we may have.”

“And they said, ‘You can never be too rich or too thin.’”

He smiled. “Something like that. I pointed out that Lillian would not be obliged to leave a dime to me, even if we are related. She may decide to leave her money to her pet cat for all I know.”

“But Gisella’s parents don’t think the cat would be a contender if you could be proved to be the missing heir.”

“Look, it’s just what her parents hold dear. They can trace both sides of each family back to-I don’t know, Stonehenge, probably-and I don’t know what my own birth name is, let alone my parents’ names. Gisella tells me not to worry about it. But I don’t really have a family, and I guess I don’t want to start out by causing division within hers.”