“He was a nice man,” Tess prompted, yawning.

“A quiet man,” Crow added.

“He kept to himself,” they chorused.

She assumed it was the usual mundane murder, a domestic or drug-related slaying in one of the city’s sad-sack neighborhoods, the supply of which never seemed to dwindle, no matter how robust the local economy. But when the camera pulled back, the backdrop was one of the city’s nicer hotels, not the usual block of dilapidated rowhouses.

“A fatal downtown? Talk about your red ball.” She grabbed the remote and clicked on the volume. “If it’s a tourist, the city will go nuts.”

“Police are releasing few details at this time, and hotel officials have declined to be interviewed on camera, but details obtained by Channel Six-”

“Which is to say, the Channel Six reporter showed up and listened to the police spokesman,” Tess muttered.

“-indicate the victim was returning to the Harbor-South Hotel from dinner at a nearby restaurant when he was accosted by a would-be robber and stabbed after a brief struggle.”

“The Visitors and Convention Bureau is going to love this. Everyone said when they built that hotel it was too far from downtown, that people would never want to walk that far east.”

“But the neighborhood is as safe as any other downtown location,” Crow said. “Safer, in some ways. I’d rather walk there than around the Convention Center.”

Tess saw her one friend in the police department, Homicide Detective Martin Tull, in the background, conferring with the uniforms on the scene. Television cameras were unkind to him, highlighting his pitted skin and the narrowness of his face. He was handsome in real life, almost pretty.

But he wouldn’t be the one to comment on camera. That task always fell to one of the public information officers, who knew so little about police work that they were never at risk of saying anything interesting or relevant. Tonight, the PIO on duty was a woman, and Tess had to wonder if she had been so well dressed and beautifully coiffed before the homicide call came in.

“We know the victim is a fifty-three-year-old Caucasian male,” the PIO droned to the reporter. “A witness has told police the victim was about a block from the hotel when he was accosted by a man. They appeared to exchange a few words, and then the victim fell to the ground. The witness ran to the hotel, shouting for help. When police arrived, the man’s personal effects were spread around him, as if his attacker had emptied his pockets after wounding him. His wallet was found a few feet from the body, emptied of all his cash, and he’s not wearing a watch, so we think the robber may have taken that as well.”

“What was the weapon?”

“He was stabbed, but no weapon was recovered from the scene.”

“Can you release his name to the public at this time?”

The public information officer glanced down at her notes. “Yes. We located his wife at their home in Washington, and she has made a tentative ID. The victim, who was on business here, was”-she stumbled a little over the name-“Jim Yeeger-no, Yeager. His wife says he works in television.”

The reporter continued to blather on, doing the microphone tango with the PIO- your turn, my turn, your turn, my turn-but Tess was having a hard time concentrating on the words. Jim Yeager, stabbed. Jim Yeager, dead-seventy-two hours after his ugly confrontation with Cecilia. Not that Cecilia, or anyone in her ad hoc group of activists, would ever do such a thing. It was unthinkable. And if someone had killed Jim Yeager to make a political point, why disguise it as a street robbery? Unless, of course, the point was to show Jim Yeager that it didn’t matter if someone stabbed you for your wallet or your sexuality, dead was dead.

Crow took the remote from her hand and pointed it at the television, clicking on some nonexistent button. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, as the reporter and the public information officer chattered on, “but I want everything to work like a computer mouse. I keep thinking I can zoom on the television screen, magnify the images I want to see.”

“What caught your eye?”

“There’s something there”- he continued to wield the remote like a pointer, as if he could force it to take on new properties through sheer will-“at the edge of the tape. Tull was kneeling in that spot for a moment. But it’s dark. I can’t tell exactly what he was looking at.”

He clicked to another channel, found another view of the same scene, another reporter with hair ruffling in the wind, waiting his turn for the public information officer, like a dateless man in a stag line. Forced to fill the time, he was chatting with the anchor back in the newsroom, answering the very questions he had probably told the blond newscaster to ask him just before they went on the air.

“And there are no suspects at this time, Bart?” the anchorwoman chirped.

“Police have not made an arrest as of yet, but they are looking into details of how the victim spent his last few hours here in Baltimore. They know from his wife that he went out to dinner, and police say they have found a receipt that places him at an Inner Harbor restaurant this evening, although they don’t know yet if he was dining alone or with a companion.”

“Why was he staying in Baltimore?”

“He had been doing his show from here since the Poe murder, which had captured his attention-”

The channel switched again. “Sorry,” Crow said. “An accident.” But Tess held his wrist before he could click again. On this station, the photographer had managed some arty shots of the scene before police had pushed the media back, and she had picked up the detail that had caught Crow’s eye. Round and red, they looked like blood splatters at first, but these had thorns.

Three red roses. Three… red… roses. Not one or four, not white or pink, not carnations or daisies. Three red roses. Was there a bottle of Courvoisier in the street, too? A bottle in a Baltimore gutter could be overlooked much too easily. Only the upscale brand would make it stand out.

Protective Crow instinctively started to click the remote off, but Tess grabbed it from him, grimly determined to hear the rest.

“And he was coming back from dinner?”

“Yes, he was coming back from dinner in the Inner Harbor.”

“Jesus,” Tess said to the television. “If you don’t know anything, just shut up.”

The phone rang, and she allowed Crow to mute the set. She assumed it would be Tyner, but the number on the Caller ID screen wasn’t a familiar one.

“Yeah?” she said absently, waiting to hear the usual pitch for a credit card or long-distance service.

“They’re worth killing for,” an unfamiliar voice said. The connection was bad, or the receiver had been covered with something.

“What?” Even as her mind was scrambling, Tess was digging for a pen and a piece of paper. When she couldn’t find the paper, she scrawled the number on her hand.

“Now you know what I’ve known all along: They’re worth killing for.”

“What? Who?”

But the call had been terminated with a quiet, dignified click. She dialed the number on her hand, only to hear it ring in the night, over and over again. Finally, on the fifteenth or sixteenth ring, someone picked up.

“You got the wrong number,” a voice told her, a different voice. Or was it? The first one had sounded distant, vague, as if coming from a great distance. This man was cocky, his voice street-hard.

“How do you know it’s the wrong number?” she asked, looking at the seven digits on her hand.

“Because this is a pay phone at North Avenue and St. Paul. It ain’t nobody’s right number.”

“Did you see the man who was at this phone not even a minute ago?”

“Lady, it’s not a neighborhood where people stand still for very long, you know? I was coming out of the KFC, and I can’t walk past a ringing phone. I just gotta know-you know?”