“You mean, like going on forever?”

The reporter proved to be kind; Tess awarded him a few mental points for the gentle tone of his follow-up question. “Did he like the work of Edgar Allan Poe? Did he read a lot of his poems or stories when he was growing up?”

The Hilliards looked at each other as if this were a game show and they were desperately afraid of getting the answer wrong, lest they not be allowed to go on to the next level.

“He read some,” Mrs. Hilliard said at last. “He read a lot. But he did other things, too.”

“Such as?” An eager young woman with a tape recorder, she had Washington Post written all over her.

“He watched television,” Mr. Hilliard said, prompting a nervous laugh among the reporters, then silence. “Well, he did.”

“Bobby liked…” Mrs. Hilliard paused, and the reporters leaned toward her, various recording devices in hand. “He liked nice things. He liked to dress just so, and he liked antiques. He’d go out to the yard sales on the weekends, bring home what looked like junk to me. But he’d shine it up, or refinish it, and his room was so nice. I was surprised he left all those pretty things at home when he came down here, but he didn’t take a stick of it.”

She stopped, surprised by all the words that had come out of her mouth, and held her hand to her face again, as if to hold back anything else that might spill out.

“Can we see his apartment here?”

“No,” Rainer said.

“Why not? It’s not a crime scene.” This was Herman Peters, the Beacon-Light’s police reporter. Rainer had stepped in it now, Tess thought. Peters would charm the landlord with his sweet little rosy-cheeked face, if only because Rainer had declared the apartment off limits. Peters specialized in getting that which was deemed ungettable.

“It’s a private residence that may yield important information in an ongoing investigation. We can’t have reporters trooping through it to get little details, like what he read and what brand of shampoo he used.”

Tess was impressed in spite of herself. Rainer did know something of how journalism was practiced these days, how reporters gathered random bits and tried to construct shoddy wholes out of them.

“Where is the apartment?”

Rainer shook his head, but Mrs. Hilliard volunteered, “Near that big school, the one where they’re always playing lacrosse so you can hardly park.” North Baltimore, Tess deduced, near Johns Hopkins University. There were a lot of apartment buildings in that neighborhood.

“Are police sure that Bobby Hilliard was the intended victim?” This was Herman Peters again, and he sounded irritable. Sob stories didn’t interest him. Tess thought she had seen a lot of death, but, after just two years on the police beat, Peters was at five hundred bodies and counting.

“No comment.”

“I have to ask because conflicting information has been coming out. Some say the shot was fired at a distance, from the law school construction site, but I’ve also heard it might have been from the catacombs.”

“There’s no conflicting information because there’s no information coming out of this department,” Rainer said testily. “If you got that, it’s not official, and you shouldn’t print it.”

“Okay, okay. But if the other guy was standing between Bobby and his killer-assuming the other guy wasn’t the killer-is it possible the shooter missed, hit the wrong one? You’ve ascertained that Bobby probably wasn’t the regular Visitor. But was he the intended victim?”

“That’s not something I’m prepared to comment on just yet.”

“I can’t imagine,” Mrs. Hilliard put in, “that anyone would want to kill Bobby. He was a nice boy. He never bothered anyone.”

“He was a nice boy?” parroted a television reporter, a handsome African-American man, one of the second-teamers used on the weekend crews.

“He was a nice boy,” she repeated firmly, sure of something at last.

“Did he ever speak of his plans for the future?” This was from WBAL’s radio reporter, a young woman. Tess thought she saw her Norwegian buddy in the cluster of radio reporters, but she couldn’t be sure. It was funny, how reporters were drawn to their own kind. The print reporters stood with the print reporters, while the television folks clustered down front and the radio people set up camp on the edge.

The Hilliards looked puzzled.

“I mean”-the WBAL reporter looked embarrassed-“no one plans to be a waiter forever.”

“They don’t?” Mrs. Hilliard asked. “He loved his job. And sometimes he got to take food home. When he visited, he’d bring us leftovers from the restaurant, and you know what? The aluminum foil would be in the shape of a swan.”

Tess could tell Rainer’s appetite for center stage was waning rapidly. He had probably put this together just to get the press off his back, figuring it would be easier for the Hilliards to run this gauntlet once and get it over with. Tess hoped he had plotted an escape route for them, because everyone here was going to clamor for one-on-one interviews as well. Reporters were unruly houseguests, taking each kindness for granted and whining for yet more liberties-the jackals who came to dinner.

“Have you considered the possibility that your son was the victim of a hate crime?”

The voice, instantly familiar to Tess, came from somewhere in the middle of the pack. It was a woman’s voice, clear and sweet, with the kind of nonaccent that came from working hard to eradicate a stubborn one. Yet it wasn’t a newscaster’s voice. It had a slight excited quaver, and it was rapid, too rapid for broadcast. Tess craned her neck to see the speaker, but all she caught was a glimpse of short dark hair and a long delicate neck.

Rainer appeared to recognize the woman, however. His face flushed, he wagged a furious finger at his questioner. “This is for press, not agitators. You got no standing, no standing here at all.”

“Fine. Then I’ll let the reporter from the Alternative repeat my question, which you’ve refused to answer despite his repeated requests.”

A husky male voice obligingly shouted out, “Have you been told your son may have been the victim of a hate crime?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” Rainer barked at the Hilliards, scaring them so that they backed away from the microphones. “It’s not true, anyway.”

The media types began to buzz and stir, although Herman Peters simply looked impatient. He was ahead of everyone else on this story, Tess realized; he had already investigated-and rejected, or at least tabled- this strange and tantalizing tangent. The Hilliards were more confused than ever, glancing between Rainer and the roomful of reporters they wanted to appease.

“Hate crime,” Mrs. Hilliard said at last. “I’m not so sure what that is. I mean, if someone kills you on purpose, they pretty much hate you, right?”

They don’t know, Tess realized, as an awkward silence fell. Reporters understood the significance because the questioner was from the Alternative, a local paper for the gay community, but Bobby Hilliard’s parents were completely in the dark.

“Good point,” Rainer said, clasping Mrs. Hilliard’s shoulder. “Good point.” He was really only 99.9 percent an asshole. Unfortunately for Tess, she was never going to benefit from that 0.1 percent of niceness. She wondered if he would try to bring her in for questioning, after seeing her here.

The woman’s voice rose up again; Tess was close to placing it, but the speaker’s identity still eluded her. It was familiar, but only as a memory.

“For those members of the media who are interested in the story that’s not being told here, local activists will be available later today on Monument Street at Mount Vernon Square, west of Charles.”

“You got a permit?” Rainer challenged.

“We don’t need a permit to hold a press conference,” the girlish voice replied evenly. “Do you have a permit?”